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To be clear, Tig Notaro's second album is titled LIVE [liv, verb].

LIVE [liv, verb] was recorded, uh, live [l?v, adj. or adv.] at Largo on August 3rd, 2012 at her monthly show, "Tig Has Friends." The day before this set, Tig was diagnosed with cancer in both breasts. This news was the bookend to an agonizing year in which Tig spent weeks in the hospital battling an intestinal bacteria infection. A week after being released from the hospital, her mother unexpectedly died. Then, in the middle of it all, her relationship fell apart. Which leads us here. Tig's 30 minute set is not much more than an open-mic set in that it's half scripted, raw and real. It's an insightful detailing of her assessing a horrible set of circumstances in a calm, clever and clear manner.

"Live at The Moth" was recorded on December 5th at The Avalon Hollywood. The story, recorded for the acclaimed storytelling podcast, is a companion piece of sorts to LIVE. In the 16 minute piece, Tig elabroates on the death of her mother and how the untimely passing eventually lead to a reconnection with her step father.

"In 27 years doing this, I've seen a handful of truly great, masterful standup sets. One was Tig Notaro last night at Largo." -Louis C.K.

Damien Jurado is the sort of songwriter who straddles rock's past and future, and with each record contributes a new chapter to an ever-fruitful body of work. Before we move onto the next chapter, we look back his first album with Secretly Canadian. An instant classic when released in 2003, Where Shall You Take Me? was his fifth full-length, and is a beautiful collection of ten Raymond Carver-esque vignettes terror and bliss in Middle America. Celebrating the 10th anniversary of this fine release comes a deluxe 2xLP vinyl reissue, incorporating unreleased basement reel demos, and the Just In Time For Something ep (never before released on vinyl).

"If it were not for Jason Molina, I may not have ended up on the Secretly Canadian record label. The guy practically twisted one arm behind my back, and with the other, walked me through the front door of where I am today. I am eternally grateful for the guidance, knowledge, influence, and inspiration he so graciously shared with me. The reissue of this album is dedicated to his life and legacy." - Damien Jurado

The charming strength of the resulting Dungeonesse rests in the dichotomy formed by of a bold re-introduction of the beautiful imperfections of the human voice into a landscape of what is an increasingly mechanized process of music making. The fun resides in the listen.

Includes Dungeonesse self-titled full-length on both vinyl LP and CD, glossy 11 x 17" poster featuring the album artwork, "Drive You Crazy" b/w "Private Party" single on 12" vinyl, and digital download code for the full album (as .zip file containing 320 kbps mp3), redeemable April 29th, 2013.

Bigfoot posesses flirty rhythmic sensibilities both snappy and sparkling, a rosy, near-tropical warmth, and a loose and conversational feel that position you right in the line of Yudin?s wry gaze.

Secretly Canadian is proud to announce the 15th Anniversary reissue of a Songs: Ohia classic, the Hecla & Griper EP, now appearing for the first time on vinyl with previously unreleased bonus material.

After spending the summer of 1997 on the road, Jason Molina and Co. headed into Bloomington, Ind. studio The Grotto with producer Dan Burton and layed down these eight songs. Odes to the love of loss and reggae friends. If you have ever found the other pillow empty in the morning, this is what you need to dry your tears. It also features a Conway Twitty cover.

This vinyl reissue contains two previously unreleased Songs: Ohia tracks ("Debts" and "Pilot & Friend") and alternative versions of two songs that would later appear on Songs: Ohia's Impala ("Hearts Newly Arrived (Hecla Session)" and "One of Those Uncertain Hands (Hecla Session).

Diplo has risen through the ranks and asserted himself as one of the most pioneering producers of the time. Through unending curiosity and exploration of the vast multitudes of the world?s musical heritages, Diplo has managed to seamlessly connect the global underground to the audio mainstream.

Deluxe package includes:- 320 kbps mp3s of the album redeemable on April 15- Tour Poster featuring Album Artwork by Ferry Gouw- CD: Ships for release week of April 16 - Jewel Case w/ 6 page Booklet - Get Free Vinyl 12" ? Ships with CD, week of April 16 - 2xLP - Available to ship week of April 26 ? Double LP on Limited Edition Yellow and Red Vinyl  ? Gatefold Jacket comes with a fold out poster

Images du Futur builds upon the intensity of Suuns' 2010 debut, but often does so through new textures and subtler dynamic maneuvering. Album standout "Edie's Dream" begins with a single bass line repeated from which layers build & rise ? first drums, then a wash of white noise; echoes of guitar, then chanted vocals. The song's clever shifts are jazz-touched and delicate, almost subliminal. It all makes for a stark, skeletal boogie ? more an astral projection than a song. "Edie's Dream" exemplifies the restraint of which Suuns is capable and works to make the unhinged moments all the more devastating.

Lauded by Pitchfork and NME ? the former saying "few bands this young are operating on quite this scale, and fewer still have the brass-- and the patience-- to pull off a big, glitzy, complex record like Zeroes QC," and the latter declaring them 2011's Best New Band ? Suuns have deepened their approach, using minimalist techniques to create maximalist works. Produced once again by Jace Lasek from Besnard Lakes, Images blasts out of the gate with "Powers of Ten," laying out a sort of manifesto for the record in the very first lines: "Got it together/I read in the paper/all of theses strangers/stranger and stranger.../No, no, no, no, how you try and remember/how all of these pieces/all fit together." Shemie says of the process, "As a band we were trying to look at our music from further and further away, seeing more details in the picture as we expanded the landscape."

Limited edition 7? from Jens Lekman featuring the title track of his new album, I Know What Love Isn?t, and an exclusive b-side cover of Ten City?s ?That?s The Way Love Is?.

The son of a genetic engineer, Dave Hartley has eschewed his father's profession but decidedly inherited his analytical proclivities and love of "the lab." As Nightlands, Hartley is a scientist trying to create and understand art through analytical process. Here, with sophomore album Oak Island, his follow up to 2010's superb Forget the Mantra, new questions are explored: what happens when the human voice is layered exponentially? Nightlands takes us on a spirit quest through lush forests down into The Uncanny Valley. Each distorted, silver-voiced melody is wrapped in the sounds of 70s AM gold ? plucked acoustic guitars, trumpets, dulcimers and hand percussion. Hartley is a prolific sideman in many notable Philadelphia bands and the extraordinary bassist of The War on Drugs. Listeners expecting a simple side project, however, will be surprised by the boldness and scope of his vision--Nightlands is the Chuck Close painting to the The War on Drugs' De Kooning.

Dungeonesse is a collaboration between writer/producer Jon Ehrens (White Life, Art Department) and singer Jenn Wasner (Wye Oak, Flock of Dimes). Born of a mutual admiration for Top 40 and R&B and the mechanics of what makes a hit song, the duo and longtime friends began putting jams together remotely. The songs of Dungeonesse retain an experimental and playful inner beauty while leading the charge to a dance floor of abundantly inclusive and carefree spirits.

Occupying the twilit space between Ariel Pink?s lo-fi avant pop and the codeine beats of Chromatics, Nite Jewel's debut album, Good Evening, brought a glorious new slant to the golden age of disco and became an after-hours go to from the record shelf. Recorded when Ramona Gonzalez was still a college student, Good Evening was originally released on Gloriette Records in 2008. The album is dance music on an intimate scale, drawing inspiration from Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam and Arthur Russell, filtered through a lo-fi recording process. Out of print on vinyl for several years, the reissue will include two bonus tracks, a cover of Can forebear Inner Space's "The Kamera Song" and a D?M-FunK remix of original track "What Did He Say." The updated reissue packaging also includes Gonzalez's art, poetry and lyrics from the time period.

No one knows summer like Santa Monica?s Zach Yudin.

?Can you hear it comin'?? he asks, at the start of ?Cayucos?, the opening salvo by his band Cayucas. With a nod to 60?s beach blanket pop gems and bonfire folk songs, Cayucas hits the waves runnin?, causing involuntary head bobs, finger snaps, toe-taps and the ability to shake your booty like it?s strapped to a brand new set of maracas. Producer/multi-instrumentalist Richard Swift deftly captures Yudin?s inimitable voice as it echoes through the barrel of the perfect wave. It's a song for the ages for sure.

The B-side ?Swimsuit? continues to carry the torch, with its cocktail-lounge organ flourishes painting a picture of young, carefree days spent pining for your summer love. Enjoy just a hint of the party that?s still to come, and let Cayucas take you to your inner sanctum where there's always sunshine, and a Pina Colada is always a good idea.

Full length to be released early 2013.

Taken By Trees' Other Worlds is a impressionist poem for the Hawaiian Islands, where on a recent visit, chanteuse Victoria Bergsman found a swell of creative inspiration.

Working closely with photographer Amanda Marsalis, Victoria intimately documented her time in Hawaii. "I gathered ideas for songs, recorded nature sounds and Amanda filmed and took photos of me constantly. Her work is very dear to me and both of us believed this [project] to be something special and very precious."

Producer Henning Fürst collaborated with Bergsman on the sound and overall feel of the album. The album's dub ventures are gently layered with synths and Victoria's voice, floating along with the bass line. The music reflects the natural beauty of the Hawaiian islands ? floating in a perfectly blue pond, a kind breeze coasting off the waves, abundant deep green foliage, sweet slices of pineapple and milky coconut, the delicate pink of a seashell curled like a baby's ear. Sandy toes, hidden waterfalls, the dreams you have after a long day at the beach.

Jens Lekman will release a new album, I Know What Love Isn't , on September 4 on Secretly Canadian. The album is his first full length in 5 years, following the critically acclaimed Night Falls Over Kortedala .

The album came out of a break up which isn't a new story. He fell in love and it didn't work out. It borrows sparingly from the vast and colorful palette of sounds he created on Kortedala. I Know What Love Isn't has strings but not a string section, an upright piano not grand, a single saxophone, gracenotes from a flute, a lot of tambourine. Combined in exact proportions with Lekman's melancholy abstract lyrics, the songs evoke the classic sound of the Brill Building in it's heyday.

Lekman is a storyteller of the highest caliber, letting his delicate vignettes unfold to show the wonder that lies in the mundane. That's what I Know What Love Isn't ? is. A collection of songs that grew to a story that had to be told. A story that is not new, but essentially human. The story of the grey areas of love t25hat you have to excavate and explore, using the method of exclusion, to find out what love is.

Yeasayer's third album, Fragrant World, is a hulking beast of a record. Keyboards clank and wheeze, tiny claps stumble against busted drum machines, and there's very little obvious guitar. It's an album that grapples with the schizophrenia of the modern world by gathering piles of electronics and molding them into something huge and often gorgeous.

Antony and the Johnsons: CUT THE WORLD is a collection of live symphonic performances of songs from the band's 4 full length albums (SWANLIGHTS, THE CRYING LIGHT, I AM A BIRD NOW, S/T). Recorded in Copenhagen, DK with The Danish National Chamber Orchestra, CUT THE WORLD features arrangements by Nico Muhly, Rob Moose, Maxim Moston and Antony.

Additionally the title track "Cut The World" is featured here for the first time. It is one of Antony's new songs for The Life and Death of Marina Abramovi? directed by Robert Wilson and staring Antony, Marina Abramovi? and Willem Dafoe.

CUT THE WORLD was recorded live on September 2nd and 3rd, 2011 at the DK Concert Hall in Copenhagen, DK and represents Antony's continued meditation on light, nature & femininity. Antony discusses his ideas on the track "Future Feminism", a speech he made during one of the concerts. Addressing the affects of patriarchy on the global ecology, Antony explores the possibility of shifting towards feminine systems of governance in a gesture to restore our world.

"Dreams" is a highlight from Taken By Trees' Other Worlds, an album front-to-back inspired by chanteuse Victoria Bergsman's visit to the Hawaiian Islands. The touches of dub are gently layered with synths and Victoria's voice, floating along with the bass line. The music reflects the natural beauty of the Hawaiian islands -- floating in a perfectly blue pond, a kind breeze coasting off the waves, abundant deep green foliage, sweet slices of pineapple and milky coconut, the delicate pink of a seashell curled like a baby's ear. The Dreams 12" features extended instrumental and dubbed out remixes by Henning Fürst of The Tough Alliance.

Porcelain Raft's "Drifting In And Out" is the opening track to his debut full length, Strange Weekend. It's the Italian born singer's anthemic, gauzy and chiming cavalry call to arms.

The 7"s b-side, "Chain", astutely balances melancholy and wistfulness. Remiddi does his best heart string pulling to date as he sings "and I feel something/something I cannot deny/half my life behind."

Brooklyn, NY's Exitmusic -- comprised of Devon Church and Aleksa Palladino (of HBO's 'Boardwalk Empire') -- will release their debut album, Passage, on May 22nd. Passage is a collection of newly-written songs and some of their older tunes that received some new coats of paint. Here, the two tethers that make up Exitmusic's sound -- one stirring atmospherics, one of grandioise and thoughtful pop ? are let to bow further out than before. They are, however, also pulled into a tighter, sharper knot at the center. There are big, emotional dynamic shifts, and a wave-crashing momentum across the set without ever breaking a sustained feeling of tenderness. It's dream-pop for those of us whose dream lives are Lawrence of Arabia-epic in scope: lulling, apocalyptic, celestial, triumphant. This is arena-goth.

Here We Go Magic spent the better part of 2011 putting together "A Different Ship" with producer Nigel Godrich (Radiohead, U2). The resulting album is sunny and spacious, with "How Do I Know" as its molten core. With its instantly hummable refrain, the song builds layer by layer from a simple guitar-vocals-drums combo into a swirling symphony of glorious noise.

The disc is backed with "My Plate's on Fire" - an outtake from the band's recording sessions with Godrich. The fuzzy drone creeps steadily along under singer Luke Temple's falsetto and demonstrates the range of this remarkable band.

A Different Ship is Here We Go Magic's most remarkable and captivating album yet, with an emotional and musical arc that is alternately calming and anxiety-inducing, and often both at once. "I Believe In Action" and "Make Up Your Mind" sound like they're being beamed in from outer space, while more earthbound tracks such as "Miracle of Mary," "Over The Ocean" and "Alone But Moving" amble in a somnolent haze, with Temple's cool timbre cutting through the fog.

Recorded & produced by Nigel Godrich (Rodiohead, Beck), the ten songs of A Different Ship carry a consistent thematic concern -- what the band describes as an "unresolved tension between valuing being alone and valuing being connected." Says Temple: "The music is beautiful, but feels like it's brittle and about to crack. It's always suspended in between major and minor, happy and sad, trying to find that middle ambiguous place."

jj nº 4 features two new songs from the Gothenburg duo.

California native Ramona Gonzalez first began her transcendent minimalist dance-pop escapades in the privacy of her own home in Los Angeles with the aid of her multitrack cassette recorder. She very quickly developed her own unique sound, taking inspiration from European experimental electronic music and U.S. R&B pop, and began performing live in the L.A. area under the moniker Nite Jewel.

Since the release of Nite Jewel's mesmerizing 2008 debut Good Evening, the Los Angelese outfit has honed its lounge-pop-R&B craft across releases from Italians Do It Better, Mexican Summer and LA/Bay Area labels Gloriette Records and Human Ear, which collectively lead to a wealth of refinement and bold directness in both singing and songwriting. Then, in late 2011, the "She's Always Watching You" 7" appeared from Your Truly's Love Letters Inc. label, highlighting newly minted vocal styles for Nite Jewel and hinting at the maturation of its sound. On One Second of Love, the forthcoming Nite Jewel opus, you'll find a re-imagination of Golden-era R&B pop; future-classic sounds alongside vocal sultriness. If Nite Jewel's earlier work brought to mind the likes of Lisa Lisa or Debbie Deb on quaaludes, this new body of work may conjure up clearer images of the likes of Sade, Eurythmics-era Annie Lennox and Tracy Thorn. Produced with longtime collaborator Cole MGN (The Samps, Ariel Pinks Haunted Graffiti), the entire affair is pure, confident, singular-but-intricate and delightfully sophisticated. Nite Jewel's evolution of fidelity and nuance comes to a head with the release of One Second of Love.

At Richard Swift's National Freedom studios, the live-to-tape ethos allowed the songs on Damien Jurado's Maraqopa to expand and retract like a great beast's breath. Every in-the-moment bell and whistle here is hung with a natural, casual care. And from this, each song offers up its own unique gift: the enchanting children's choir that echoes each line of Jurado's lament for innocence lost on "Life Away from the Garden"; the breezy bossa nova that begins "This Time Next Year" and rises as effortless as a smoke cloud into high-noon showdown pop; "Reel to Reel"'s wobbly, Spector-symphony and its meta themes; the wonderful falsetto vocal work Jurado pulls from himself on "Museum of Flight." The Seattle Times recently called Jurado "Seattle's folk-boom godfather," a praising recognition to be sure. But also a title Jurado might not yet be ready to accept. That's a title for someone who has settled. With each visit to National Freedom, Jurado is exploring, taking risks. He's not only freeing his songs. The gate is opened wide to allow us all into his once-isolated musical universe. One gets the sense he's just now hitting his stride.

Porcelain Raft's thesis statement hits when side B kicks off with "Unless You Speak From Your Heart." Remiddi's enigmatic vocals carrying a hook so simple that you might think you sang it first; keys and bass that might make the needle jump off of your turntable; and a sense of raw sincerity that has come to trademark Remiddi's songs is what ultimately resonates.

The b-side, "Something In Between," with it's shimmering Cocteau Twins guitar line, cleft bass, and colorful reverb is the gentlest of tornados. One that's sturdy enough to pick you up & take you for a spin but at, the end, sits you back down leaving you feeling like you just had your first Summer romance.

Noisy and experimental, Britain's Swell Maps experienced little commercial success during the course of their chaotic career, but in hindsight they stand as one of the pivotal acts of the new wave: not only was the group an acknowledged inspiration to the likes of Sonic Youth and Pavement, but their alumni - most notably brothers Nikki Sudden and Epic Soundtracks - continued on as key players in the underground music community. Although Sudden (vocals/guitar) and Soundtracks (piano/drums) formed the first incarnation of the Swell Maps as far back as 1972, the group did not begin to truly take shape until 1976, when the siblings enlisted bassist Jowe Head and guitarist Richard Earl. In the spirit of punk's "do-it-yourself" mentality, they formed their own label, Rather Records, and issued their debut single - the brief, jarring "Read About Seymour" - in the early weeks of 1978. Local media support soon won the group a distribution pact with Rough Trade, but they did not resurface until over a year later with the single "Dresden Style."

Noisy and experimental, Britain's Swell Maps experienced little commercial success during the course of their chaotic career, but in hindsight they stand as one of the pivotal acts of the new wave: not only was the group an acknowledged inspiration to the likes of Sonic Youth and Pavement, but their alumni - most notably brothers Nikki Sudden and Epic Soundtracks - continued on as key players in the underground music community. Although Sudden (vocals/guitar) and Soundtracks (piano/drums) formed the first incarnation of the Swell Maps (named after the charts used by surfers to gauge wave intensities) as far back as 1972, the group did not begin to truly take shape until 1976, when the siblings enlisted bassist Jowe Head and guitarist Richard Earl. In the spirit of punk's "do-it-yourself" mentality, they formed their own label, Rather Records, and issued their debut single - the brief, jarring "Read About Seymour" - in the early weeks of 1978. Local media support soon won the group a distribution pact with Rough Trade, but they did not resurface until over a year later with the single "Dresden Style."In mid-1979, the Swell Maps released their full-length debut A Trip to Marineville, a crazy-quilt of punk energy and Krautrock-influenced clatter. After the release of the speaker-shredding single "Let's Build a Car," the group recorded one final studio LP, Jane from Occupied Europe, before breaking up. Each of the members followed their own career paths, playing solo and forming bands: Sudden formed the Jacobites, Soundtracks joined Crime and the City Solution, and Head played with the Television Personalities. - Jason AnkenyEach album has been remastered, includes liner notes and unreleased photos as well as bonus tracks not available on previous versions of these albums.

Remiddi's androgynous vapor of a voice weaves like a ghost between Nick Gilder and The Alessi Brothers, Julee Cruise and Judee Sill. In more contemporary terms, Porcelain Raft stands confidently on a high hill between the sounds of M83 and Beach House. Lead track "Drifting In and Out" is loping and anthemic; gauzy and chiming. "Shapeless and Gone" follows with a heavy strum reminiscent of "Cosmic Dancer" -- full of mood and style without all the wearying excesses and feathered boas. Porcelain Raft's thesis statement hits when side B kicks off with "Unless You Speak From Your Heart." Remiddi's androgynous vocals carrying a hook so simple that you might think you sang it first; keys and bass that might make the needle jump off of your turntable; and a sense of raw sincerity that has come to trademark Remiddi's songs is what ultimately resonates.

The War on Drugs' 2011 breakthrough record, Slave Ambient, is both sprawling and full of bravado. And "Come to the City" is its sprawling, full-of-bravado centerpiece. Yet, for all the bombast contained within the song -- the synth-and-sax drones, the searing guitar, the relentless fist-pumping charge -- "Come to the City" is a delicate balancing act. Adam Granduciel proves himself a master of texture, tone and momentum -- building maximum tension through careful sonic sculpting. Even when its anthemic baseball park finale drops, Granduciel buries it in the ambience just enough so that "Come to the City" never looses that feeling of almost peaking. Its as-yet-unreleased B-Side, "Don't Fear the Ghost," is pure desert-trance American music, Suicide on a southwestern vision quest. This limited-run "Come to the City" 7" is a celebration of a magnificent year for The War on Drugs, as well as a highlight of the band's singular songcraft.

With a couple weeks off this summer in Montreal, we thought we'd take a crack at a few new songs. Stark and futuristic, these are extended jams that may or may not materialize as condensed versions of themselves on records to come. Open air textures, repetition and exploration were the name of the game for us on this one, and the finished product is a refined mining of the ideas that came out. "Bambi" is a creepy story of love lost and found, while "Red Song" is just that: a song about color.

About a year ago, Richard Swift horrifically fractured his left ring finger. For a moment his nimble guitar and piano work flashed before his eyes. Doctors were saying things like "movement and feeling could eventually return," etc, etc. Certainly, not even a little blip on the sadness radar of humanity, but a massive bummer for a fellow who has carved out a niche as one of independent music's sought after session players and producers -- and especially in relation to the astounding Richard Swift solo output we all know and love.

So, it's with a great, collective sigh of relief that he's back to churning out new material like "Whitman." It's chugging, chiming and triumphant, featuring Swift's always-endearing falsetto and casual call-and-response lyricism. "I've got my own Whitman...Farewell, farewell/I hope it did you good/To say the things/My father never could," Swift pines. The song is a cryptic salute to Walt Whitman, whose American lineage of primal, urgent art can be traced to include Kerouac and Dylan, Bo Diddley and Beefheart -- right on through to modern outsider-pop wunderkinds like Swift. And according to Swift, "Whitman" is a nice taste of what we can expect from his next longform recording.

The same can be said for the remainder of the Walt Wolfman EP. Conceived in the same spirit that gave us 2008's cult favorite Ground Trouble Jaw EP, these blown-out, basement R&B rippers are not for the faint of heart. They require movement and sweat, dancing with a cocktail glass in your grip until your shoes are soaked in booze. Highlight of the set, "MG 333," is a raw and ghostly trance, a blast of kinetic energy and jazz cigarette smoke. Meanwhile, the neu-vintage jive of "Drakula (Hey Man)" and "Zombie Boogie" pack a timelessness that transcends their seasonal titles. And yeah, that's Swift himself on rapid-fire drums across the whole damn set. Shit, he might have been fine without that measly finger after all.

Sometimes, listening to Exitmusic, it's hard to tell exactly whether the goosebumps you're getting are from the parts that are chillingly beautiful and melodic or the ones that are aching and guttural. Or further, the ones that are creepily sparse and disembodied. The New York City duo -- Aleksa Palladino and Devon Church -- doesn't care when the chill runs down your spine, they just hope their music provokes some kind of primal feeling. Church explains, "It's like what Aleksa sings at the end of 'The Sea': 'And you turn your back to life... Oh, sorrow.' We want our music to confront people in a gentle but powerful way, to make them feel something."

Church and Palladino started writing together several years ago, when Church moved to New York following a year teaching English in Taiwan and India. "We had a funny dynamic musically, at first," says Church, who grew up in Winnipeg. "I was listening to things that had elements sonically of what we're doing now -- Radiohead's Kid A, that second Sigur Ros album, Godspeed You Black Emperor, Warp Records electronic stuff. But all I had to work with at the time was an acoustic guitar. Meanwhile, Aleksa was recording all these really interesting, odd arrangements on her four-track that would be about a minute long and only have one movement in them, and it sounded more like what I was into than what I was doing."

In the symbology of Lekman's songbook, motion is a means to stave off insanity or succumb to it and the songs on "An Argument With Myself" EP deal with many types of movement, both big and small, from why he moved to Melbourne to the societal change/movement in his old hometown of Gothenburg to simple map directions.

The opening song and title track begins with this excellent Jens archetype, recounting an inner battle while walking home through the central business district of Melbourne, Australia. While on its face, "Waiting For Kirsten" seems to trace an ultimately futile odyssey to track down Kirsten Dunst while she films in Gothenburg, its really an attempt to work out the complex relationship one has with one's hometown. The comfort and disappoint of what's changed, and what seems to never change. Alternately, the horn driven "New Directions" brings a slightly manic roadmap of directions to any place but here and any time but now. The songs are witty, literal, and impeccably location-specific, and they're all heading somewhere as a means to either go crazy or keep from doing so.

With more fractured textures that combine horns, flutes, string swells and arpeggiated guitars, the opening of the EP finds Jens in constant state of transition, musically, as well. However, as "An Argument With Myself" comes to a close the arrangements get looser, more reggae-tinged and relaxed, like a music box winding down. For a moment, the motion almost stops. For now.

Philadelphia's The War on Drugs, the vehicle of Adam Granduciel -- frontman, rambler, shaman, pied piper guitarist and apparent arranger-extraordinaire, returns with Slave Ambient.

On their debut, the life-affirming Wagonwheel Blues, and the follow-up EP, Future Weather, The War on Drugs seemed obsessed with disparate ideas, with building uncompromised rock monuments from pieces that may have seemed like odd pairs. Folk-rock marathons come damaged by drum machines. Electronic and instrumental reprises precede songs they've yet to play, and Dr. Seuss becomes lyrical motivation for bold futuristic visions. Now, Granduciel has done it again, better than before: Slave Ambient, their proper second album, is a brilliant 47-minute sprawl of rock 'n' roll, conceptualized with a sense of adventure and captured with seasons of bravado.

Slave Ambient features a team of Philadelphia's finest musicians, including multi-instrumentalists Dave Hartley and Robbie Bennett, and drummer Mike Zanghi. Recorded throughout the last four years at Granduciel's home studio in Philly, Jeff Ziegler's Uniform Recording and Echo Mountain in Asheville, NC, the album puts the weirdest influences in just the right places. Synthesizers fall where you might expect more electric guitars (and vice versa); country-rock sidles up to the warped extravagance of '80s pop. Instant classic "Baby Missiles" is part Spingsteen fever dream, part motorik anthem. "Original Slave" might sound like a hillbilly power drone, but "City Reprise #12" suggests Phil Collins un-retiring to back Harmonia. "I Was There" is Harvest rebuilt by some selection of psychedelic all-stars, while the shuffling, sleepy opener "Best Night" offers a band with too many ideas to be in a hurry. During the mid-album centerpiece "Come to the City," Granduciel howls and moans, "All roads lead to me/ I've been moving/ I've been drifting." Indeed, however unlikely that might seem, all these sounds arrive cohesively in one unmistakable place. Every song on Slave Ambient is instantly identifiable and infinitely intricate, a latticework of ideas and energies building into mile-high rock anthems.

On August 2nd, Secretly Canadian is proud to release the debut album by Tig Notaro entitled Good One. She is the first and only comedian we've had the good fortunte to work with. Good One contains well crafted and silly material touching on subjects such as her family tree, Mexican hotel door signs, birthing a dinosaur, and how Taylor Dayne is the easiest person in the world to run into, amongst other things. A deluxe version of the album contains the long anticipated DVD of Have Tig At Your Party, the human equivalent to the "burning log" DVDs.

Gardens & Villa channel all the taut pop precisions of 90s Britpop of bands like Blur (borrowed from the 60s anyhow), and send it through an 80s synth filter both undeniably coastal and modern. It's Spoon's Kill The Moonlight lost in a daydream, but with that same hungry energy. Gardens & Villa may simultaneously pull from Gary Numan, The Kinks and odder prog within one composition. And like a fine sweet tea, it's made just that right kind of sugary -- though even the most upbeat tunes have an undercurrent of the bittersweet and the lost at heart.

In 2010, Gardens & Villa traveled to Oregon to record their debut with visionary, vibemaster and labelmate Richard Swfit. Together, they put some sand in the sheets of new wave ("Black Hills") and pop some translucent funk ("Orange Blossom"). There's also a level of effortless class maintained across the whole set. Each and every lush little gem explores the wonderful mystery between intuition and proficiency, between tension and repose.

Gardens & Villa are Chris Lynch, Adam Rasmussen, Levi Hayden, Shane McKillop and Dusty Ineman.

Since Bodies of Water's last record, 2008's 'A Certain Feeling,' much has happened to them; travels throughout N. America in their stalwart motor-home, the departure and arrival of various band members, the unexpected notoriety of core duo David & Meredith's crypto-disco trio 'Music Go Music,' and the construction of their drafty yet dependable home studio. From this milieu has emerged the singular statement that is "Twist Again." Recorded and mixed at home by David and (a newly pregnant) Meredith in Highland Park (their northeast L.A. neighborhood), the album is a work out of time. It sounds like no other record of 2011, or maybe any other era. The album seems to have escaped the stamp of the cut & paste digital age - it sounds like people playing music together in a room, which it essentially is.

Nightlands is the recording project of Philadelphia-based multi-instrumentalist Dave Hartley. The music he creates in his bedroom is itself a bed of delicate, chiming strings and bubbling synths beneath a blanket of choral vocal arrangements. It's dreamy in the literal sense -- the seeds for the album were sown when Hartley began archiving musical ideas that occurred in his sleep with a simple bedside tape recorder. As a result his debut album Forget the Mantra is, in essence, a field recording of Hartley's dreams -- a travel journal through pop music and a collection of psych-hymns from the first human lunar colony. The songs sound both huge and intimate, breathy and cavernous like massive echoes of a faraway concert. It's the big, shadow music from just across the lake.

The album deals with themes of anxiety, fear and the limits of concentration. Therein, it mines Hartley's personal history as often as it does influences The Beach Boys, The Traveling Wilburys and Hawkwind. Side A pulses with layers of tom tom drums on wide-open standout slow jam "300 Clouds" and nimbly-picked acoustic melodies on "Suzerain (A Letter to the Judge)," like Crosby, Stills & Nash gone comsic-kraut. The songs roll and gallop then stop to breathe, always exhaling with what sounds like a thousand voices. Through its experimental back half -- reminiscent of Bowie's Low or Kate Bush's "The Ninth Wave" from Hounds of Love -- full of vocal samples from Hartley's real life, the more pop-leaning front end is given greater context, like a close study of a plant's blossom before traveling down through its root architecture.

Hartley, who for years has been a prolific sideman in many Philadelphia ensembles (most notably The War on Drugs), laid these songs to tape on a Tascam 388 insularly over several months, inviting friends along for feedback and ultimately, some additional tracking.

"There are degrees of warmth...and Philadelphia musician Dave Hartley's Nightlands project sounds like it was recorded in a hearth...Hartley's music seeps out and fills spaces, combining the kind of expansive resonance found in Mercury Rev's Deserter's Songs with Beach Boys-like vocal arrangements..." - Pitchfork

The January EP's six songs complete the songwriting cycle that Here We Go Magic began in an upstate New York farm house upon the commencement of their critically-acclaimed sophomore LP Pigeons (2010, Secretly Canadian). The band's signature mix of swirling guitars, krautrock grooves, pulsing synths, and hushed chants provide a foundation for these otherworldly songs. 

Canopy is the debut EP from duo Painted Palms. Pieced together via email by cousins Reese Donohue and Chris Prudhomme, Painted Palms' Canopy is a modern psych-pop collage with an affinity for fluidity and the exotic. With its echoes of Brill Building pop, buoyant electronics, and encompassing textural experimentation, the EP exudes something ebullient as well as meditative.

LITTLE SCREAM's music is--like her moniker suggests --full of contradictions. It is at once both familiar and foreign; weaving multiple genres into a sparkly and Jovian landscape. Nowhere is the Martian and sublunary contrast more present than in two of The Golden Record s standouts, "Cannons" and "The Heron and the Fox". While Cannons conjures visions of receiving signals and painting portals through space over celestial echoes and otherworldly buzzes, The Heron and the Fox recalls a more terrestrial sound while recounting an intense yearning and lamentation of her salad days through a quiet, painful present.

Nightlands' David Hartley is in the creative pocket at the moment. On the heels of his lovely Secretly Canadian debut, Forget the Mantra, and at the precipice of Nightlands first-ever live engagements, Hartley gives us the All The Way 7". It's Forget the Mantra's strange lil' bro, doing all sorts of interesting, unknowable shit in his room all night long.

"All The Way" is an ode to pain and reinvention, a joyful noise about hopelessness. Written, recorded and mixed in one day. Like Jeff Lynne floating down Billy Joel's River of Dreams on a drone raft. It's flipside, "Buggin Out," absolutely comes from an obsession with Bo Hansson's Lord of the Rings (1970), the epic Swedish instrumental masterpiece. The skeleton of the track was played live on Hartley's Hammond 144, originally clocking in at almost 16 minutes of synth/organ madness. After some Casio/Korg overdubbing, the piece was chopped to the still-epic, seizure-enducing 6 minutes we have before us.

Featuring remixes by Painted Palms and European electronic artists VILLA, I Remember is the fourth single from Yeasayer's renowned ODD BLOOD.

Since the release of their critically acclaimed 2007 debut All Hour Cymbals, Yeasayer has been around the world and back again. While their first record was conceived in total artistic isolation, constant touring forced Yeasayer to finally engage with their contemporaries. Inspired by musicians hell-bent on sonic experimentation as well as those more comfortable in a pop context, Yeasayer find their domain spanning across the musical spectrum. Studied, road worn, and eager to begin phase two, Yeasayer retreated to upstate New York to begin work on their new album titled ODD BLOOD.

If All Hour Cymbals was Yeasayer's attempt at global and ambient cultural mash-up then ODD BLOOD takes place in an off-world colony sometime after the Singularity. Glimmering reverb haze is eschewed and replaced by a cavalcade of disorienting pitch effects and flickering ectoplasmic wisps. Instead of layered vocal harmonies the processed vocals congeal into blots and blobs of otherworldly chatter. Many organic elements are left behind and replaced by sounds and rhythms that inspire the body as much as the mind. At times Yeasayer sound as if they would be at home playing live in scene from Blade Runner or inside one of Oscar Neimeyer's concrete modernist temples from the 1960s.

ODD BLOOD plays out at a blistering pace, yet it never sacrifices depth or content. It is immediately evident the band has advanced in songwriting as well as sonic craft. Lyrically, it is a more mature and honest album than the first, as the band demonstrates a confidence to explore more personal themes alongside vividly depicted tales. One thing is certain: Yeasayer are accomplished audiologists who are willing to pilfer decades of pop sensibilities and cultural history to create something that is uniquely their own.

The War On Drugs is once again at the blurred edges of American music: overexposing studio limitations, piling tape upon tape to maximum density, and then -- with each song -- they pull off the scaffolding to reveal what sticks, keeping only what's absolutely necessary and dig into what sounds like the best kind of fucked up. As on their debut Wagonwheel Blues, they take small moments occurring over multiple tapes and multiple song versions, and put every last drop of trust in their own instinct of momentum.

Future Weather is a provocative -- sometimes playful, sometimes weighty -- glimpse into The War On Drugs' song-sculpting process, a process that remains a big mystery even to those on the inside. While some bands are content to merely pace the abyss, The War On Drugs coast through it. And along the way, Future Weather sidesteps most every connotation associated with the EP format. There's a true coalescence and symmetry here, one of wash and drone, of momentum and tone, but also of theme. Friendship, loyalty and keeping a group of spiritual brothers together are all themes that songwriter Adam Granduciel focuses in on for Future Weather. "Wondering where my friends are going / Wondering why they didn't take me / Looking out the window of my room / Looking out where something once ran wild," he sings on "Brothers" with a sense of soured peace, leaving out all the right things, leaving room in there for the shared experiences of your own friends. There are cues taken from our best American songwriters, yet The War On Drugs are wise enough to also implode or send themselves into outer space when the moment calls for it. The driving organ riff that pushes "Baby Missiles" may be inspired by a fever dream of Springsteen or Dire Straits more than any particular jam. And the endless layers of guitar melody and atmospherics of "Comin' Through," rather than add weight to the vessel, only work to fill its sails with warmer and warmer winds.

Antony and the Johnsons will release their new album, "Swanlights", on October 12th in the US via Secretly Canadian. Abrams Image will simultaneously release a special edition of "Swanlights" which will include the CD inside a 144-page art book containing Antony's paintings, collages, photography and writing. The album only version of "Swanlights" on Secretly Canadian will also include the song "Flétta", a duet with Bjork. The album and book are a continuation of Antony's work exploring environmental issues and his connection to the natural world.

While "I Am a Bird Now" was arresting in its simplicity and vision and "The Crying Light" is a masterpiece of austerity, "Swanlights" may be Antony's most wide-ranging emotional work to date. It is a record that is at moments excruciating and tender, and at other times has a wicked gleam to its teeth. Musically it's the most maximal of his work to date. Whereas on "The Crying Light", Antony paired everything back to its most distilled and essential, on "Swanlights" the vines have become overgrown and the sound palette has become more exotic, strange percussive elements, John Cale-esque string drones, heavily distorted guitars and symphonic voicings thread the song cycle together.

"Everything is New" opens the album with subtle piano and an insistence that each moment takes its own breath and is reborn. Strings and bursts of percussion carry the melody as it soars through a cacophonous wilderness. "The title track finds us navigating a primordial and seemingly amorphous plane of expanding guitar tones and an almost Eastern influenced melody, exclaiming the elusive, magical and perhaps ominous, even dangerous majesty of "the Swanlights on the water, on that shining face". On "Thank You For Your Love", he repeats what at first seems to be a simple sentiment and infuses it with a gradually escalating sense of urgency, breaking completely from the 4/4, Otis Redding-esque structure of the song into much more intense. over.

The book is a collection of visual art, thought-provoking dreamscapes composed of paintings, drawings, photography, collage, song lyrics, and writings. Often fragmentary images, these pieces capture liminal states and elements of the unconscious. Some images are reclaimed and reconfigured in order to transcend their previous form. The intersecting mediums inform each other and create an interesting dialogue with Antony's music, his creative muse, and personal mythology.

"Swanlights" is the fourth Antony and the Johnsons album and the follow up to the critically acclaimed smash "The Crying Light" which topped year-end best of lists across the globe in 2009. Antony burst into the international spotlight with his second album, "I am a Bird Now", which won the UK's prestigious Mercury Music Prize.

Montreal's Suuns possess a rare trait in rock music: restraint. They use it like an instrument, which makes their debut full-length Zeroes QC as unsettling as it is wonderfully exasperating. It's immediately apparent in album opener "Armed for Peace," a track that starts off like a robot breaking down in a hot desert; the song's mechanic beat plods like iron-shoed footsteps as the melody of a wheezing synth mirrors the crackling sound of old transistors and circuitry being cooked in the sun. It's deceptively lulling, the tension almost unnoticeably wrenching up and up until the track unexpectedly opens into a barrage of nose-diving guitar riffs and crashing drums ? yet the band still stays locked on the song's linear, forward-motion direction.

Zeroes QC is a warm yet dark, propulsive collusion of pop, post-punk and experimental rock ? one that allows the group to musically shapeshift without losing any of the sense of tension and unease that runs throughout the record. During tracks like "Gaze," tightly wound guitars and bass ring and buzz atop Liam's metronomic, powerhouse drumming, with Ben's cool, detached vocals acting as a nervy counterweight as he delivers falsely assuring lines like, "Don't you be yourself, you are someone else." Often his close-miced sing/speak is as metronomic as it is melodic; in "Arena" Ben's rhythmic "What-choo, what-choo"'s are reminiscent of Suicide's Alan Vega as he leads the band's death disco groove into a bloodbath of razor-sharp guitars, while his icy, hushed delivery in "Sweet Nothing" is almost as motorik as the song itself. Most impressive, though, is how Suuns effortlessly sculpt memorable pop songs from experimental building blocks, frequently using noise and space as actual hooks. All of this amounts to a great first album ? one that is as timeless as it is thrillingly modern

In anticipation of their new album, "Swanlights", Antony and the Johnsons will release "Thank You For Your Love" as the first single / EP via Secretly Canadian in the US and Rough Trade in Europe and the UK. The EP will feature 4 additional non-album tracks including originals "You Are The Treasure," and "My Lord My Love" as well as a cover of Dylan's "Pressing On" and Lennon's "Imagine" in collaboration with experimental composer William Basinski. The CD will also contain the video for "Thank You For Your Love" made from archival Super 8 footage of Antony upon his first arriving in NYC in 1991, edited by David Boatman.

David Vandervelde's very clothes were ablaze that day in his Nashville basement. And the only thing that was ever going to put the flames out was laying "Learn How To Hang" to tape. How else does a song so immediate come to be? The repeated mantra of its title, set to an exhilarating, tightly-wound Buckingham-like lick, is just as much Far East philosophy as it is the most serious of stoner advice. It's a self-effacing moment of clarity under the heat of a blowtorch. Same goes for its brother jam, "Wave Country," with its galloping, sunburst metal and inner-bitch-slap hook, "You ain't any cooler in the shade." And how could we, in good conscience, ever sit on songs so immediate for any longer than one red-hot heartbeat?

Imagine if the teenagers in Footloose would have been fighting for their right to party whilst blasting a shit-ton of glam and bliss-metal. David Vandervelde would have ruled prom and then thrown the most righteous kegger ever, with "Checkin Out My Baby" and "Fancy Friends" on repeat. DV is on an absolute tear right now, churning out these rollicking nuggets of summers future like a man possessed. And how could we, in good conscience, ever sit on songs so immediate for any longer than one red-hot heartbeat? Some jams can't simply be placed on a release schedule months in advance. Songs like these st be loaded in our bow and shot out into the world.

Summer Time Hits collects these four Vandervelde instant classics, originally released as digital singles, onto limited-press, screen-printed 12" vinyl.

In the summer of 2009, Gothenburg, Sweden's jj quietly released one of the year's most critically-acclaimed albums. The album jj nº 2 was the group's debut full-length (their first single was jj nº 1). Secretly Canadian is proud to join forces with Swedish label Sincerely Yours for the worldwide release of this remarkable record.

jj create R&B and balearic dub from the ghosts of lost lovers; pop as delicate as a fawn's nose across blades of frosted grass. It is the soundtrack for friends packed into the town square's tiniest tavern, their moontanned, apple-cheeked faces glowing, their dilated pupils filled with all the meaning and meaninglessness of a magic 8-ball. Their music is both carefree without carelessness, and self-aware without being self-conscious. With it, they build an ice bridge arching from gothenburg into the heart of middle America, and everywhere in between.

In a world of "slow" movements that rail against mindless consumption, rock survivalists Windsor for the Derby represent "slow" music. For their latest outing, they began with a set of seemingly infinite drones and loops inspired by their early beginnings as a band. As those recordings were passed back and forth, the sounds were further sculpted by Dan Matz and Jason McNeely into their own leftfield brand of pop song. This became Against Love.

The raw appeal and romanticization of their look and biography is now an afterglow. The audacity of their sound is familiar to music fans around the world. It's a new year and what we've got is the band back home in Johannesburg, steady gigging and gearing up for the performance at the opening ceremony at the world's biggest sporting event, taking place in BLK JKS' backyard. The World Cup. This is the sort of moment for which BLK JKS were built.

While FIFA may have already selected its theme song for the Cup, we'll let you in on a secret. The unofficial anthem ? the song kids in Soweto are singing on their way to matches ? is not something imported or made for the moment. It has lived there, waiting for the world to turn its ears to South Africa, just now. Secretly Canadian is stoked to present you with ZOL!, the new BLK JKS ep just in time for The World Cup.

Here We Go Magic is a five-piece band made up of members Luke Temple, Kristina Lieberson, Michael Bloch, Jennifer Turner, and Peter Hale. They originally came together in New York in early 2009 through a series of chance encounters, overheard conversations and supernatural occurrences.

Pigeons, set for release on Secretly Canadian in late Spring 2010, was produced and recorded by Here We Go Magic over four months in the late Summer and Fall of 2009. The band plans extensive touring in conjunction with its release.

Imagine if the teenagers in Footloose would have been fighting for their right to party whilst blasting a shit-ton of glam and bliss-metal. David Vandervelde would have ruled prom and then thrown the most righteous kegger ever. DV is on an absolute tear right now, churning out these rollicking nuggets of summers future. And what are we to do but serve as the slingshots for to launch them through the windows of Old Man Winter's house. We're taking our sun back. Let's party.

Saint Bartlett opens up with a grandiosity yet unheard on a Damien Jurado album. It strips away the many layers of paint from the house down the street where we know Jurado has occupied for the last decade. The new coat is exhilarating. It makes the whole neighborhood shine. It's a modest grandiosity; still homegrown. The mellotron swells, heavenly handclaps ring in stereo and big drums create a sky for the songs to fly in. And the words. Words spring forth from within the volcano of Jurado, full of hope. There's so much hope, in fact, that album opener "Cloudy Shoes" turns into a call-and-response with himself, as though it were a dialogue between two halves of himself.

O.N.E. is the second single from Yeasayer's highly anticipated ODD BLOOD. Featuring a remix by up and comers XXXchange as well as the original demo version, the O.N.E.12-inch is a Record Store Day Exclusive.

Since the release of their critically acclaimed 2007 debut All Hour Cymbals, Yeasayer has been around the world and back again. While their first record was conceived in total artistic isolation, constant touring forced Yeasayer to finally engage with their contemporaries. Inspired by musicians hell-bent on sonic experimentation as well as those more comfortable in a pop context, Yeasayer find their domain spanning across the musical spectrum. Studied, road worn, and eager to begin phase two, Yeasayer retreated to upstate New York to begin work on their new album titled ODD BLOOD.

If All Hour Cymbals was Yeasayer's attempt at global and ambient cultural mash-up then ODD BLOOD takes place in an off-world colony sometime after the Singularity. Glimmering reverb haze is eschewed and replaced by a cavalcade of disorienting pitch effects and flickering ectoplasmic wisps. Instead of layered vocal harmonies the processed vocals congeal into blots and blobs of otherworldly chatter. Many organic elements are left behind and replaced by sounds and rhythms that inspire the body as much as the mind. At times Yeasayer sound as if they would be at home playing live in scene from Blade Runner or inside one of Oscar Neimeyer's concrete modernist temples from the 1960s.

Last summer Gothenburg, Sweden's jj quietly released one of 2009's most critically-acclaimed albums. The album was named nº 2 and it was the group's debut full-length (their first single was nº 1). With the naive swagger of youth, jj have already completed their next full-length. We here at Secretly Canadian are incredibly proud to present nº 3 to you. If nº 2 was (as it was to many) the quintessential summer 2009 album, nº 3 is destined to be the quintessential winter 2010 album, a soft, red smear of blood on a field of fresh snow.

jj create R&B and balearic dub from the ghosts of lost lovers; pop as delicate as a fawn's nose across blades of frosted grass. It is the soundtrack for friends packed into the town square's tiniest tavern, their moontanned, apple-cheeked faces glowing, their dilated pupils filled with all the meaning and meaninglessness of a magic 8-ball. Their music is both carefree without carelessness, and self-aware without being self-conscious. With it, they build an ice bridge arching from gothenburg into the heart of middle America, and everywhere in between.

Since the release of their critically acclaimed 2007 debut All Hour Cymbals, Yeasayer has been around the world and back again. While their first record was conceived in total artistic isolation, constant touring forced Yeasayer to finally engage with their contemporaries. If All Hour Cymbals was Yeasayer's attempt at global and ambient cultural mash-up then their new album, ODD BLOOD, takes place in an off-world colony sometime after the Singularity. Glimmering reverb haze is eschewed and replaced by a cavalcade of disorienting pitch effects and flickering ectoplasmic wisps. At times Yeasayer sound as if they would be at home playing live in scene from Blade Runner or inside one of Oscar Neimeyer's concrete modernist temples from the 1960s.

After the rubble clears from opening track "The Children", the album leaps into Yeasayer's version of the pop anthem with "Ambling Alp," "Madder Red," "I Remember," and "O.N.E." Yeasayer have plunged into the craft of pop music, and the exercise has paid off. The second half of ODD BLOOD is slightly more experimental in nature. Sci-fi musical jams ("Mondegreen"), maniacal rants ("Grizelda"), and paranoia ("Love Me Girl") show the band exploring more paranoid motifs, yet never deprive the listener of hooks and ear candy.

ODD BLOOD plays out at a blistering pace, yet it never sacrifices depth or content. One thing is certain: Yeasayer are accomplished audiologists who are willing to pilfer decades of pop sensibilities and cultural history to create something that is uniquely their own.

Consider the collective catalogs of these two prolific masters of the new American folk songcraft: Magnolia Electric Co., Centro-matic, Songs: Ohia, South San Gabriel. Now, let's just be honest. A little bit of artistic ego and one-upsmanship can serve a greater purpose. In this collaboration between Jason Molina and Will Johnson, each seem to hold the other's talents to the fire and elevate both performance and creativity. In the friendly sharing of ideas, Molina and Johnson become two poets' poets in a workshop to craft a singular, searing elegy.

Hello Again Music Enthusiast, It has been 2 full years since I last wrote about Yeasayer's debut album All Hour Cymbals and prophesied on the power of their music. I could rejoice in the accuracy of the claims, but we are merely in the beginning of the Yeasayer life cycle...there is work to be done. After 3 white winter months (Feb-Apr '09) in upstate NY at the Marotta cabin, Yeasayer wrote and layered songs for #2 (album title TBA). The tracks were then transported to Great City in NYC for mixing and the microscope. Out of these sessions came "Ambling Alp," which we elected as the first single for Yeasayer #2. A stand out from their recent live set, the band reworked the song into its former: a pop anthem. The 12" single contains remixes by friends Memory Tapes and DJ/rupture and is Yeasayer's first release on US label Secretly Canadian.

To celebrate the release of the "Ambling Alp" 12" we will be unleashing a breakthrough video at yeasayer.net on the evening of October 30th. Hush-hush we must be regarding this activity, but we promise something pioneering. More soon regarding movement in early 2010. Best.

"When people talk about the rebirth of disco, this is how it should be, manic zombifications reanimated from the Abba songbook, wired with Philip K Dick paranoia and Donna Summer euphoria," says the NME on Music Go Music's debut full-length Expressions. The Los Angeles trio recorded the album over the course of a year-and-a-half. They make pop music but, fortunately, the term means very little these days. What kind of pop music is it? Rock and Roll, Disco, Metal, Boogie, Trans-Hand, Psychedelic? Fader magazine perhaps put it best when they said, "They begin with a bright-eyed Scandinavian sashay and end with a ten-minute Mediterranean disco romp featuring programmed drums, making detours along the way into rainy day ballads and guitar infernos. The cumulative effect plays like the greatest hits of dance saviors that never existed...and indeed, they probably should only be performed from inside an aquadome at the bottom of the Caspian Sea, or at least during a summer-long residency in Ibiza." Indeed.

What happens when a band of resolute perfectionists make their most accessible and upbeat rock album -- a departure so startling, you almost want to call it "their pop album"? When Early Day Miners loosen up, it's almost a different band. The complex layers and atmospherics are still there, but front-and-center on The Treatment are insistent basslines and straightforward melodies on multiple organs and guitars. One of the poppiest here, "So Slowly", manages to combine a buoyant Cure bassline, a wah-wah solo worthy of Robert Fripp, and yet still conveys the lazy drift of summer. You can even hear an echo of "Sympathy for the Devil" on the album's centerpiece "How to Fall". In some respects their most personal, subjective, and emotional album, The Treatment starts like every pop album should, with an invitation to join the band in enjoying The Treatment : "we're going out tonight / won't you join us?" but subtle clues reveal its questioning voices are not so straightforward. So listen close -- this is an album whose every layer demands attention, and re-pays it.

You keep on your eyes on the horizon long enough, you're bound to hit the coast. Jason Molina and the men of Magnolia Electric Co. have explored all realms of classic rock - from the subtleties of folk to charging Crazy Horse meditations. Now, on Rider.Shadow.Wolf. the band brings a surf-rock dynamic to its signature punch. This is where the tired rider, just having battled the desert, meets the eternity of an ocean.

Also found here is a stripped-down, early take of "Josephine" from the band's recent longplayer of the same name. This particular recording of Josephine was laid down just after the song's inception, during the session that will later be released as a collaborative album from Molina and Will Johnson of Centro-matic. This version features Molina and Magnolia utility man Michale Kapinus on keys, and serves as a preview of what's to come in the arch of Molina's career.

Just a short time ago -- in a last ditch effort to supply a borrowed van with wheels to make a club gig -- the four members of BLK JKS took turns hand-over-hand pushing a tire through the darkened, kinetic streets of Johannesburg, South Africa's Soweto township. For bandmates Lindani Buthelezi, Mpumi Mcata, Molefi Makananise and Tshepang Ramoba it's a simple and tough philosophy: every gig, everything at stake. They have shared stages in North America and Europe with artists as celebrated and disparate as Femi Kuti, Santigold, Dirty Projectors, Michael Franti and Cody Chesnutt; they have played festivals like Sasquatch and Soweto Arts Festival; and Ramoba has been celebrated by Billboard as "the best musician" at SXSW. It's an inspiring juxtapose from that day when a Jo-burg gig hung in the balance. But to witness the frenetic energy and soaring celebration of a BLK JKS gig is to know that they have maintained that same ideology. It's been too long since anyone was able to bring this much soul and heartblood to progressive rock, a medium that has been left cold and dry by a misguided focus on technical show-offery. But by entangling the music they love -- township blues, fringe jazz and renegade dub -- into the DNA of prog, BLK JKS have provocatively pulled afro-futurism into a new century. After Robots has all the ingredients of a party record -- young, joyous musicians; surging, afro-drumming; aggressive horn blasts (supplied by the cultishly famous HYPNOTIC BRASS ENSEMBLE) -- but this is not party music. It's at times disorienting and overwhelming, but it always maintaining a cool, alluring mystique. It's in Mcata's patient, complex and enviable jazz chord vamping. It's in Makananise's from-the-pocket-to-the-stars bass approaches. It's in Buthelezi's blues-inflected phrasing and searing guitar leads. It's in Ramoba's super-polyrhythmic, flailing beats. In January 2009, BLK JKS set foot on US soil for just the second time, holing up with Brandon Curtis (SECRET MACHINES) in the quaint, spirited town of Bloomington, Indiana, to record the music that would become After Robots, their first proper album. Ten-hour days turned into fourteen as the band relentlessly exorcised their collective ideas and ideals about music. The process was an overwhelming sensory experience in its own right. To discuss certain musical passages for which there is no accurate English befit to describe, BLK JKS seamlessly shifted from accented English to their differing tribal languages. Then --giving up on words altogether -- they'd dive back into a fine-tuned performance of a song. It is the band's tendency to work it out on the spot that is most impressive about their approach to recording and structure. After Robots triumphs on its own strange set of genre-ending rules, and BLK JKS are undeniably a band of our times, embodying the duality of our violent and hopeful new world, these days of mystery and wonder.

Antony and the Johnson will release the "Aeon"/"Crazy in Love" double A-side single in the US on August 4th on CD and 7"through Secretly Canadian and on August 3rd in Europe and UK on 7" through Rough Trade. "Aeon" is one of the highlights of the critical and commercial smash album "The Crying Light" which debuted at #1 on the European chart. The band appeared on The Late Show with David Letterman for the song's television debut. Antony and the Johnsons' earnest and impassioned cover of Beyonce's "Crazy in Love", a long time live favorite, is being released officially for the first time.

Perhaps more sonically upbeat than its predecessor, Creaturesque's details are at times painted in both optimistic and sobering tones. Reitherman's scattershot poetics touch on an array of ideas; it's oppressive American machisimo and Suburbanite sexuality. It's soft drugs and convertible cars. It's the struggle for higher expectations within the mess of modern life, and when wrapped up in the structures of TMTS' sure-handed tunes it's an all too delicious combination.

Molina's concept album is an honest-to-God effort on the part of Magnolia Electric Co. to pay tribute to the life and spirit of fallen bassist Evan Farrell (R.I.P. December 2007), as the ideas for Josephine were being pieced together. Molina said each tune is a good faith attempt to make real Evan's hopes for the record. And in doing so, Evan's spirit becomes part of the concept. The loss of Josephine becomes the loss of Evan. Molina's familiar lyrical allegories are still in tact. But here, in what is no doubt the strongest set of songs Molina has written since the inception of Magnolia Electric Co., those classic themes take on new meanings. Molina has approached the universal loneliness before, but never in such a focused, directed manner as found on Josephine.

For this 12" release, Osborne -- the MacGyver of house music -- chimes in for an extended club remix of Johannesburg quartet BLK JKS's "Mystery", originally from the Mystery ep (released 3/10/09 on Secretly Canadian). In true communal spirit, BLK JKS covered Osborne's "Afrika Even More" (for future release) and called it fair trade. With the bass nearly bumping the needle off the record, we recommend you bust out your best moves early and often.

BLK JKS defy description. With a wrecking crew rhythm section, debonair vocals, and guitar concoction of one part shred and two parts soul, BLK JKS shoot an African music sensibility through the tenets of rock. On one hand it is easy to politicize BLK JKS; as seen on the cover of Fader, here is a band that is instantly young, black and fly even as they reclaim styles that have been stolen, watered down, and regurgitated for generations. And yet to get caught up in anything but their sound is to sell this phenomenon short, because as musicians--as artists--BLK JKS simply cook.

An album of dense pop that justifies the band's place among top songsmithing contemporaries like Cass McCombs and James Mercer, as well as greats like (dare I say it?) David Bowie (There, I said it). But the band is able to bypass the "songwriter" label by delivering a much more collective sound -- you know, like a BAND. African high-life guitars are countered with New Wave wash; the sound of a band daring to keep its pallet open to most any influence -- from U2 to The Feelies. If the Walkmen weren't afraid to go out in Bermuda shorts and flip-flops, you may have a sound close to this... like it could be Phil Spector's mid-70's 'lost recordings' inspired by the depth of second-line drum bands from New Orleans.

It's been said that Foreign Born is an anthem band without "the" fist-pumping anthem, which may be true. And this is OK, because the trade-off is for an album far more cerebral and sustaining. The thing with summer anthems is that they only last a summer, Foreign Born delivers the soundtrack for the backyard BBQ of the ages.

It's been six years since Jason Molina has bestowed a 7-inch on us and it was well worth the wait. The first three songs of It's Made Me Cry, the first 7-inch under the Magnolia Electric Co moniker, are comprised of compositions conceived, written, recorded and mixed by Jason and company over a series of five days in Bloomington, Indiana as they geared up for tour in October '08. The fourth track was recorded at the same studio about a year prior featuring the late great Evan Farrell, a Protection Spell for his new journey.

The voices and moods are diverse and an exciting glimpse of things to come from Magnolia Electric Co.

"Epilepsy is Dancing" -- the second single from Antony and the Johnsons' The Crying Light -- is one of the reasons Spin is raving that the band's new material is "scarily intimate and irresistibly beautiful". Antony and the Johnsons have again crafted a consummate single with the most unlikely of subjects. The B-side "Where is My Power?" burns slowly throughout hinting at its epic climax anchored by the voice Rolling Stone has called "a voice of singular majesty, an instrument of delicacy and rapture in which Nina Simone, Morrissey, and Joni Mitchell seem to inhabit the same breath". "Epilepsy is Dancing" is available as a CD single and 7" on Secretly Canadian.

The Atlantic Ocean is the fourth release from American singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Richard Swift. Celebrated for his lo-fi, experimental mélanges saluting genres from Doo-Wop to lush American Pop, Swift adds jaunty synthesizers and Motown soul to make Ocean his most danceable record to date. After touring the US with Cold War Kids, Wilco and Stereolab, Swift started recording The Atlantic Ocean in Wilco's Chicago loft on a vintage analog tape machine sold to him by Wilco's frontman Jeff Tweedy. With a methodical approach and help from engineer Chris Colbert (The Walkmen) and mulit-instrumentalist Casey Foubert (Sufjan Stevens, Crystal Skulls), Swift's vintage mixtures on Ocean are seamless and bright. A collaboration with producer Mark Ronson on track "Ballad of Old What's His Name" features the talents of Ryan Adams, Mark Ronson, Sean Lennon and Pat Sansone of Wilco, a strange pairing of musicians, producing beautiful results.

The Atlantic Ocean continues Swift's tradition of defying musical categorization while showcasing his signature wry, whimsical style. Title-track "The Atlantic Ocean" opens the album with bouncy synth-powered pop while orchestra swells blend with electric guitar solos on "The First Time." Ragtime horns parade on "Bat Coma Motown" and single "Lady Luck" brings the album to a close with Swift's signature croon hearkening serious 60s soul. With a balanced mix of dry, minimal rock and roll, and futuristic synthesizer stabs, Swift himself refers to the album's sound as "Prince sitting in on John Lennon's Plastic Ono sessions".

BLK JKS defy description. With a wrecking crew rhythm section, debonair vocals, and guitar concoction of one part shred and two parts soul, BLK JKS shoot an African music sensibility through the tenets of rock. On one hand it is easy to politicize BLK JKS; as seen on the cover of Fader, here is a band that is instantly young, black and fly even as they reclaim styles that have been stolen, watered down, and regurgitated for generations. And yet to get caught up in anything but their sound is to sell this phenomenon short, because as musicians--as artists--BLK JKS simply cook.

Purpleface is the new EP from Seattle's Throw Me The Statue. The four piece has spent 2008 touring the US and Europe supporting its critically acclaimed debut, Moonbeams. While on the road, TMTS has explored the depths of its sound, recreating its playful mystique, and emerging as a proficient and an even more engaging live act. Purpleface is the direct result of this time, albeit showing a bit of a softer side than its predecessor.

From 1979 into '83, the Indianapolis based ZBs were the finest hardcore blitz in the Midwest if not all the lower 48 states. Proof is Vicious Circle and the two decades since of copyists, bootleggers, practitioners and reunion concert pogoers.

Though before and after that LP's 1982 release they recorded the Livin' in the 80's 7", songs for three comps and released the post-mortem History Of... cassette revealing their transformation into a toured band warming to the metaphysical and their demise while still waving torches of rock 'n' roll panache.

When the Ramones lost it, the Zero Boys found it; Adding a slam brigade fist to the Blitzkrieg Beat. The Zero Boys managed to come with one of the best early 80's punk records, or one of the best records ever, period.

Between Vicious Circle and History Of, the entire recorded output of this legendary Midwest punk band's original line up is, finally, collected.

-Culminated from liner notes written by Jack Rabid and Eric Weddle

From 1979 into '83, the Indianapolis based ZBs were the finest hardcore blitz in the Midwest if not all the lower 48 states. Proof is Vicious Circle and the two decades since of copyists, bootleggers, practitioners and reunion concert pogoers.

Though before and after that LP's 1982 release they recorded the Livin' in the 80's 7", songs for three comps and released the post-mortem History Of... cassette revealing their transformation into a toured band warming to the metaphysical and their demise while still waving torches of rock 'n' roll panache.

When the Ramones lost it, the Zero Boys found it; Adding a slam brigade fist to the Blitzkrieg Beat. The Zero Boys managed to come with one of the best early 80's punk records, or one of the best records ever, period.

Between Vicious Circle and History Of, the entire recorded output of this legendary Midwest punk band's original line up is, finally, collected.

-Culminated from liner notes written by Jack Rabid and Eric Weddle

Antony and the Johnson's breakthrough second album "I Am a Bird Now" won the UK's prestigious Mercury Prize in 2005. The success that followed introduced many to a pioneering soul singer unafraid to explore themes that traversed darkness and light, life and death, male and female. Antony's inimitable voice sparked the interest of artists ranging from Bjork to Hercules and Love Affair, resulting in a series of critically acclaimed collaborations. "The Crying Light" is the highly anticipated full-length follow-up to "I Am a Bird Now". Here, Antony shifts the thematic focus and explores his relationship with the natural world. The intimacy of the Johnsons' sound is enveloped by avant-classical composer Nico Muhly's symphonic arrangements. The record's centerpiece, "Another World" traces the singer's dispair in the face of a vanishing landscape. Antony and the Johnsons' music bridges the gap between avant-classical music and the blues, and the band's sold out performances have resulted in standing ovations from Carnegie Hall to the Apollo. "The Crying Light" is a soul-stirring new work with its daring compositions and captivating vocal performances. Antony and the Johnsons have created a subtle and timely work that brings a magical and yet changing world to the forefront of our consciousness.

'Warm in the Shadows' rounds out the trio of three-song 12"s that Music Go Music have released over the course of 2008. It's both a fitting end-piece to the trilogy, and a remarkable expansion of the group's sonic and emotional breadth. There is a casual, but undeniable magic to these songs, and it flows around and out of each note of every melody.

Title song 'Warm in the Shadows' is dance music, as envisioned by a group with a greater allegiance to pop archetypes than to the hymns of the dance-floor. Its a step in a different direction; an invitation to shake coupled with a gentle evocation of the pain of wrecked love ("what kind of heart would break so easy as my own"). It's a case history and a cure for both the lovesick and the lovesick-to-be.

The B-side offers up stories of exotic depravity consuming itself in ways both savage and deceptively elegant. The gypsy rhythms of 'Thousand Crazy Nights' undergird a tale of dog-piled revelers instructed to "feel with your face, let eyes be your hands" whilst "trapped in desire's agro dance." 'Love, Violent Love' is a psychedelic voyage through a land of raving mobs who "spiral past control" once their love is at last requited.

This collection of songs is further proof of the power of the transformative embrace in which Music Go Music holds what is dear to them, and the singular vision that they impart to it.

Trying Hartz samples the first decade of the Danielson/Danielson Famile/Br. Danielson oeuvre (all the years before Ships), attesting generously to the movement of the work as a whole, from proto-minimalist eccentric gospel band to prog-metal-dread outfit to music hall choir to indie rock one-man band to outsider art celebrity to family man and family member. It's a perfect starter volume for listeners who have not had the pleasure of engaging with the evolution of this unusual, surprising, and incredibly moving musical consortium. And yet: please note that no verbal account of the work can possibly summon the effect of the decade digested in this assemblage. After all, as Daniel sings, "My Lord is known by His song." Not by His press releases. The ecstatic vision of the Danielson project is the unnamable part, the impossible to describe part, and this ecstatic vision is cumulative. It's not what Daniel says, though he always says it well, it's the circumstances in which he says it, with family gathered around him, whether related by blood or not; it's the reiteration of the spiritual thematic material, a reiteration that sounds nothing like early 20th century gospel?it's far more poeticized, it's far more elemental?but which has all the seriousness and all the joy of that long ago music. Ecstatic vision. You won't get it by reading these lines, nor even by reading the lyrics. You will get it by listening to this distillation of ten years' work and the earlier albums and going to the shows. Then you will experience the humble but devious and complicated grassroots movement that is Danielson. Trying Hartz is an essential place to start.

On Silence is Wild, Hyvönen continues to take an utterly modern approach to classic songwriting forms: blending the confessional with the fictional; mixing wit with a sexuality that shifts from the refined to the raw; all the while using language which dances effortlessly between the timeless and the contemporary, referencing high art and pop culture in a transcendent manner which masterfully put Hyvönen at the top of a new international class of singer-songwriters.

October marks yet another opportunity to look back upon and celebrate some of our favorite Danielson titles from the rich back catalog that has spanned over a decade. This epic journey of retrospection began with the vinyl reissues of Tell Another Joke At The Ol' Choppin' Block and Fetch The Compass Kids (both being released on Secretly Canadian) and Tri-Danielson!!! (Alpha/Omega) (being released on Sounds Familyre). Next in line in this series of releases is a particularly sweet treat in the 7" vinyl format. Odd Nosdam (renowned musician, DJ, co-founder of Anticon) took the reigns on remixing the Danielson track "Our Givest" (originally from Brother Is To Son) while Jeremy Novak of Dymaxion tackled "Jokin' At The Block" (originally from Tell Another Joke At the Ol' Choppin' Block).

Antony and the Johnsons emerged onto the international stage in 2005 with their breakthrough I Am A Bird Now. The group were awarded the Mercury Prize in the UK and toured the world. Since then Antony has collaborated on tracks with Bjork for her latest album Volta, appeared in the Leonard Cohen documentary I'm Your Man, featured as vocalist with Hercules and Love Affair, recorded for the Todd Haynes bio epic of Bob Dylan I'm Not There, and collaborated with Charles Atlas on a European tour of their stage spectacle Turning. 

Now Antony and the Johnsons have emerged with a new album, The Crying Light, which will be released January 2009. "Another World" is the first single, and it will be released as part of the five-song Another World EP which is being released on October 7.

On "Another World", Antony lists things he treasures about the natural world, and expresses that he will miss them; the result is hypnotic and affecting.

The EP Another World also includes "Shake That Devil". Part exorcism and part Shangri La, Antony calls out perpetrators, and banishes them one by one.

Two other songs, "Crackagen" and "Sing For Me" are pastoral and surreal. Finally the epic "Hope Mountain" closes the EP; an episodic narrative set after a flood; people gather on a mountainside to witness a girl walking on the water.

It's a question asked by anyone and everyone who pays attention to popular music; who is making music today that will be the classic rock of tomorrow. It's a tough question to answer when considering the bastion of classic rock; Rolling Stones, Eagles, Rod Stewart et al. But there is still something exciting to discover when you dig into the periphery of the standard canon. Consider the catalogs of bands that perpetually exist in that fringe. Bands like Foghat, Traffic and Free. Their discographies still contain gems to behold. Now consider Catfish Haven. They are a band that is hard to pigeonhole, regardless of all of our attempts. Catfish Haven is a band than been appropriately paired with future classic rock contenders like My Morning Jacket, Magnolia Electric Co., The Hold Steady, Lucero and Eli Reed & The True Loves. A testament to their unclassifiable, yet broad appeal, as evidenced by Devastator's in the pocket title track, organic glitterball jam "Set In Stone" and bittersweet barn burner "Full Speed"

In the spirit of Kiss' Destroyer, ZZ Top's Eliminator, and Lou Reed's Transformer, introducing Catfish Haven's Devastator.

Secretly Canadian is proud to announce the world-wide re-release of TELL ANOTHER JOKE AT THE OL' CHOPPIN' BLOCK, TRI DANIELSON!!! (ALPHA) and TRI-DANIELSON!!! (OMEGA).The Danielson Famile's carnival of soul is deeply rooted in American folk and gospel music. Having been raised on their own father's gospel songwriting in Clarksboro, New Jersey, the Famile were raised with a reverence for a deeply personal and spiritual song form, one that relished not only the song itself but also the relationships which formed around that song. And the result of a few decades of the siblings absorbing such a family practice -- as well as an ample supply of post-punk, new wave, mid-80's to early-90's independent rock, and all the Dylan and Beatles along the way -- is something like if the Carter Family and the Jackson 5 were invited to collaborate for a Sun Session with Black Francis sitting in on lead vocals during a slightly overcast Sunday afternoon. It's a strange and fascinating collision of sounds and contexts, but that's what's so incredible about the Famile; their unashamed display of all things under the sun in their travelling family circus can be so many things to so many people, but all the while being the singular vision of one truly inspired mystic by the name of Daniel. Fact: the Danielson Famile is really and truly comprised of three brothers and two sisters whose actual surname is Smith, as well as three "adopted" family members. "I'm gonna give you something that's already yours." And so opened their debut full-length A PRAYER FOR EVERY HOUR from 1995. It came out of nowhere and was recognized for its gall to be so original and without precedent. "Rarely has such purity and wholesomeness been so successfully combined with clarity of vision, sense of purpose, and sheer enthusiasm," reported John Fortunado of BUZZ magazine. As perfect a debut as the four-tracked 24-song opus was, it was with their second record TELL ANOTHER JOKE AT THE OL' CHOPPIN' BLOCK that Danielson Famile really established themselves as premier album-makers. Recorded partly in a funeral parlor in South Jersey by Shimmy Disc guru Kramer, the album stands as a potent and surreal testament to eldest brother and chief songwriter Daniel's revisionist take on the daily moral struggle we all wage. He does so with conviction and commitment, while still maintaining a sense of humor without falling into the trap of over-ironizing. "He worries about 'fleshly' matters, dreams of making babies, recalls his own birth and calls his mother 'Mommy,' and plays it all as a family pageant," said CMJ magazine. Their next two full-lengths, TRI DANIELSON!!! (ALPHA) and TRI-DANIELSON!!! (OMEGA) were recorded together and released separately as sister albums. An experiment in album form, they attempted to push out in three opposite directions from one source without a unification attempt. They proved that the Famile was a band who could translate the intensity of their increasingly famous live performances -- in which the band dons nurses uniforms that act, according to Daniel, as "visual reminders of the spiritual and emotional healing taking place" within audience members -- onto record. With these two records, the Famile's highly choreographed, yet still quite improvisational, songs showed a kinship with the bombastic theatricality of Queen and ABBA, the serrated and damaged edge of Captain Beefheart and early Talking Heads, the child-like perspective and uninhibited sense of adventure of Half Japanese and the Shaggs, and the deep spirituality of Washington Phillips and father Lenny Smith.Vinyl reissue (out 9/23/08) is expanded to a 2x12" LP format (as opposed to the 2x10" format in which it debuted) and includes 4 bonus songs from a live WFMU session from 1996.

The Danielson Famile's newest imaginarium of sound, FETCH THE COMPASS KIDS, is now accessible to the public ears from Secretly Canadian. FETCH is a collaboration between the Famile and uber-engineer Steve Albini, who slept on an air mattress in southern New Jersey for several nights just to complete the task. This unlikely meeting of the minds has produced a whirling dervish of an album, one that is both crisp and deep, with multi-colors and multi-Gospel-rhythms from the Smith family and friends on a gypsy-like parade. The audio-visual genius of eldest son Daniel, who sings in a falsetto that is both endearing and jarring, brings original art to his album covers and nurse uniforms to their live show. The music on FETCH stands alone, a daring document full of groove and sympathy, peppered with messages to take more quiet time in life, to love one other, to dip hands, feet and toes into the puddles of the Lord.The genesis of the Danielson Famile, of course, is art school. The original songs in their first form were Dan, siblings and friends belting it out before Dan's juried art professors, singing for an A on his thesis project and a chance to make it out of school alive. But one must account for earlier nights in the livingroom, nights of dad Lenny singing folk mass and Beatles tunes, with mom Marian on harmony, grilled cheese on the stove, and every snot-nosed Smith kid with their hands on something -- a tambourine, a flute, a piano. There was never any money, but there were plenty of bad jokes, prayer and music.Today the Danielson Famile brings an unprecedented sound that equally recalls French carnivals and Motown jukeboxes, as the group earnestly tumbles over each others' voices and instruments on stage, laughing inside the sleeves of their nurse's uniforms, and singing about the endless possibilities of an intimate relationship with the Creator to anyone in the international music underground who will listen.And plenty of people are listening. Lauded by music critics (Rolling Stone, Spin, Mojo, The Wire, Index) and hipsters, preachers and pagans alike; these brothers and sisters have been hammering all over this land. The Famile recently appeared in Art Forum magazine, in a Top Ten list of cultural happenings, as well as on National Public Radio's All Things Considered."Oh where to go from now? Lead me to thee passionate tree. The Compass Kids run to the Compass Passion. Fetch the Compass Kids."

Release date: 04/23/01

"Caught In the Trees" marks the dawn of a new era for Damien Jurado. It may not be a huge departure from some of his past albums musically, but lyrically Jurado has taken a giant leap forward and there is no turning back. Best known for his dark yet fragile first person fictional tales, Jurado now unlocks the door and invites us into his own enigmatic world with an energy and intensity that is all-consuming.

Jurado took a full year to make this record, longer than ever before, as he ran away from and eventually found himself in his own songs. He subsequently found refuge in sharing the songs with his closest friends and bandmates, Eric Fisher and Jenna Conrad. Having walked alongside him through this most challenging journey, the songs that came out of it are as much theirs as his. Jurado, Fisher, and Conrad collaborated on the compositions - some much more rocking than Jurado fans are used to, but ever as intense - and pulled in producers Kory Kruckenberg and Casey Foubert to contribute their own unique stylings. Recording started in the summer months and the sweltering heat, and wrapped in the freezing temps of winter. (It is clear on first listen that two distinct seasons are represented through "Caught In the Trees" - an accidental metaphor perhaps?) There was laughter and there was introspection, and the result is a record that Jurado loyalists will find was worth the wait. And perhaps a reason to listen for those who have yet to give this bedraggled storyteller a chance.

Just as there are albums that artists were born to make, there are albums that labels were born to release. Waiting For The Sunrise is one of those albums for both David Vandervelde and Secretly Canadian. Upon first laying the needle down, the listener is greeted by a warm wash of sounds that seems to breeze in from decades back. Vandervelde's singular voice emerges from the drums and keys with "When the morning comes, I will be fine, I will be fine, I will be fine" and you're pretty damn sure he will be. The tones may be familiar, but his voice as an artist is his own, new and wholly contemporary, and you feel lucky to be here to watch the emergence. Critics marveled at Vandervelde's songwriting on his debut Moonstation House Band, the mini-album which had the aesthetic wherewithal to hold its own side-for-side with the classics as a late night jam record. Spin magazine remarked that "at a pipsqueakish 22 years old, David Vandervelde is already generating the kind of indie-net whispering that musicians twice his age pine for." And on songs such as "California Breezes", "Someone Like You" and "Lyin' In Bed", it's clear that the material on this first long-player from Vandervelde is of a higher order ? lyrically more personal and stripped down. Waiting For The Sunrise is the beautiful result of having extended himself both musically and emotionally.

Like a bolt from Zeus, Music Go Music have struck again with their new 12" single, 'Reach Out.' This outing finds them exploring a darker side of pop music; the place where Deep Purple's brute force meets the Carpenter's tragic wistfulness, where Blondie's power-hooks cross melodic swords with Meat Loaf's drama-rock theatrics. They've expanded their palette considerably, yet the sound is unmistakably theirs, and the magic of it points the way to the light at the end of the tunnel. 'Reach Out' is the monologue of a would-be savior, offering to lift us from the pit of despair. It treks from Logan's Run ambience to proto-metal riffing to disco-gallop to TV detective funk and back again.

One year after the self-release of the acclaimed "Ears Will Pop & Eyes Will Blink," Bodies of Water have created another full-length offering. "A Certain Feeling," their first record for Secretly Canadian, was written, arranged and recorded in David & Meredith Metcalf's house in the Northeast L.A. neighborhood of Highland Park. The strains that one can hear running through all of Bodies of Water's music are fully exhibited here; instantly familiar melodies, rich harmonic color, expansively deft arrangements, and compositions that ebb, flow, and double back on themselves in cathartic synchronicity. Though no two songs sound entirely similar, it's a cohesive that comes out feeling like the anthemic prog/gospel/psychedelic/kraut-tribal movie score that Ennio Morricone and Phil Spector never got around to collaborating on. The choral hugeness that typified "Ears Will Pop" still rears it's emphatic head, only here it is more often held in reserve while we marinate in each movement before being pulled along into the next passage of the narrative.

"A Certain Feeling" is the sound of a group carving out an ever-evolving, but distinct aesthetic niche for themselves. Steve Reich organ figures meet brutal Sabbath-meets-Wagner riffing. A shape-note choir is dropped into the midst of an Upsetters/ESG jam. Musique concrete meanderings beget Velvet Underground plodding that escalates into a five-time tropicalia workout. In spite of (or because of) the record's breadth, it is easy to see the group's fingerprints all over. The singing, playing, compositions, lyrical themes (obsessive meta-physicality/spiritual surrender/human frailty) are unmistakably theirs. "A Certain Feeling" is a step forward, but assuredly filled with the same beautiful urgency that we have come to expect from them.

The Impossible Shapes have been merrily musickmaking ? mostly under the radar ? for a decade now. With this release the band has recorded songs which were flushed out over many live performances over many tours all across the globe. This album is their pinnacle song mound that could have been issued by Zapple, if times had been different. At the root these four long-hairs are a pop band ? kinda like how Byrds became a meta group ? who've been strained through British folk as well as the whole post/beat/mystic literate gob. Songwriter Chris Barth translates a cosmological view as psychedelic nursery rhymes or rock n roll cracked into free form strata.

The War On Drugs push the boundaries of a quintessentially American music. Guitars soar and colorful clouds roll past whatever sun or moon you are cruising under, through whatever old bar you are reveling within. The War On Drugs point toward a tireless horizon in the distance that you will never reach but are compelled to chase. It's a tail you've chased your whole life and will continue chasing because your life is more poetic when you are moving toward it - your cinematography is more rich. Wagonwheel Blues is one of those albums that each of us holds onto tightly. They get moved from apartment to apartment through the years; they are songs on the radio that follow us from town to town. They evoke waves of nostalgia and grow more poignant with each new bump along the road.

Music Go Music have the simple syrup of pop extravagance running through their veins. These arena-sized songs are composed with such savage efficiency that you find yourself humming along before two bars have gone by. They are as assured and crafted as ABBA and ELO's best songs of '76, yet Music Go Music sounds fresh. They've exploded the formulas from the inside out, sounding like a hundred others and no one else. 'Light of Love' is a true celebration of pop music's potential - laying a thin sheen of magic over the world around it, and making the tedious bits of the human experience a little less so. 'Light of Love' plays like the first three tracks of a future Greatest Hits album. "Speak to me, darling in hushed tones. Tell me your heart's true desire" sings Gala Bell on the title track, equal parts Debbie Harry, Karen Carpenter, and Kate Bush. Maybe it's the wonderfully layered vocals, maybe the rich synth textures, maybe their impossibly uplifting nature, but there is something immediately familiar about these songs. At first listen, we're inexorably drawn into their sphere. For at least a moment, we are surrounded by the halo of their refracted energy - we can bask in the light of love.

Despite the connotation of its title, "How We Lost" is a celebratory album. It's a reflective record and, in its own way, celebrates the Windsor For The Derby continuum that's been created from their first release (Calm Hades Float, 1996) to their last (Giving Up the Ghost, 2005). Each of these recordings is a sequel to the next both in narrative and musically and as the band's first two records (Calm Hades Float and Minnie Greutzfeldt) were re-released last year they found themselves in constant dialogue about their body of work and the paths they'd chosen. Also a part of that ongoing dialogue were the records that the band finds itself consistently re-visiting (Swell Maps, Section 25, Psychic TV and much of the Factory Records catalog) and what makes those recordings timeless and resonate in a personal way with the band. The songs on "How We Lost" are reflections of those records and those conversations. It's about the band and the ways the band has changed over the years, the things they hold onto and what's been left behind.

The double-EP Richard Swift as Onasis is as creatively fortifying as it is unhinged and unpolished, a primal slab thrown into the fire for dancing and merriment during the chilly months while we await Richard Swift's second full-length. Once upon a time, the idea of a record was to capture a performance, to grab the those undulating wavelengths from the air and stick them to this thing that went round and round, so later on that performance could be heard and felt and experienced again. Before the beloved studio trickery of our beloved Beatles or Beach Boys, cats gathered around a couple microphones, plugged into that thing that went round and round, and let at it. This is hardly a forgotten art, but its purveyors are languishing in the onslaught of computer perfected 1's and 0's coming from our speakers, where honesty and blemish and truth are subjected to a recording filter called Sheen that actually has setting to choose how much Soul is removed from the music. So it's no surprise Swift, a long-in-the-tooth impresario of all not-a-computer, would jangle and stomp out this tangent of jams that tape-echo a generation of pioneers who believed Rock and Roll and the Blues a celestial calling and not a lifestyle choice. Now most listeners won't think about how Swift did this on a cheap four-track; they won't immediately see his nods to Link Wray and Howlin' Wolf; it doesn't matter. The songs stand up. The songs get in your belly and wiggle your hips and stomp your foot and bob your head. Some of them float around like organ music that slipped out the church backdoor and headed to that bar with vinyl booths and a Little Richard photo over the burbling Wurlitzer of 45's. They got vibe and atmosphere. They act like great harmony, making whatever they're accompanying richer and wider and thicker.

Making waves throughout the latter half of 2007, we're super pleased to deliver Seattle's Throw Me The Statue's debut album, "Moonbeams." Conceived and fronted by Scott Reitherman, "Moonbeams", was constructed with the help of Casey Foubert (Sufjan Stevens, Pedro The Lion) to create a wondrous concoction of fuzzed out synths, brass ensembles and epic vocal melodies that have been noticeably absent since "In the Aeroplane, Over The Sea" first saw the light of day. At the album's core is a sharp sense of melody, a cutting lyrical honesty, and a bludgeoning beat that brings to mind the whimsy of Magnetic Fields, the lyrical expanse of The Microphones, and the lo-fi bliss of Eric's Trip.

While the front of the album is nothing short of the next evolution of skewed Northwest bombast with "Lolita," "Yucatan Gold" and "About To Walk" , the second half displays an unexpected maturity in young Reitherman. The title track oozes down tempo vulnerability while the closer, "The Happiest Man On This Plane" combines the best of Reitherman's predecessors Phil Elvrum and Dave Bazan.

Bodies of Water started in David Metcalf and Meredith Arthur's closet. They were newly married and lived in a very small house. The closet was the only place to put the computer that they used for recording. They eventually formed a musical group to play David's songs. Meredith figured out the piano, and their friends Kyle Gladden and Jessie Conklin learned to play the bass and drums, respectively. In the ensuing years, the four have learned to deftly spin those threads which inevitably weave their way through every Bodies of Water song: ebullient group singing, melodic invention, thundering polyrhythms, and sublime dramatic tension. 'Ears Will Pop & Eyes Will Blink' is their first full-length record, and the first release from the band's own Thousand Tongues label. The songs stray from verse-chorus structure but are engaging and memorably crafted, drawing on an admixture of traditions; the transcendent intensity of gospel, brutish gusto of punk rocking, earnest idiosyncrasy of American folk, sonic inclusiveness of tropicalia, planned jamming of prog, and the sincere bombast of musical theatre. These songs can be likened to a sort of emotional topiary; an unruly living mess lent its shape by the psychic framework around which it grows. Since its inception Bodies of Water have added an auxiliary corps of musicians and when playing in L.A. their ranks can swell to as many as 11; hitting, blaring, strumming and bowing away. The four core members' vocal synchronicity remains the group's hallmark. Their calls, responses, shouts and harmonies ride above and around a retaining wall of sound in a fleeting burst of neo-tent revival immediacy.

For the critical listener, Instruments of Science & Technology sounds like Brian Eno and Wendy Carlos had a love child in the 70's and subsequently marooned him/her/it on an Oort Cloud. If they had, this might have been the recording their love child beamed back to Earth. This largely instrumental electronic project may seem out of character for Richard Swift, who has raised eyebrows and turned heads over the past few years for his unmistakably beautiful singing voice, melancholic lyrics and sophisticated songwriting. Taking into account all three releases, it appears that Swift considers the last 80 years of recorded music as his own personal spice rack of musical texture from which to draw and concoct new musical recipes. With Instruments of Science and Technology, Swift has resurrected the earliest forms of electronic music, thrown in a few dashes of dub, hip-hop, kraut-rock, and Motown?and created a new hybrid dish. So fire up the hooka coals, turn on that full screen iTunes visualizer, and pump these jams as loud as your speakers/neighbors will allow.

NOW AVAILABLE: Secretly Canadian is excited to release this long-unavailable, sought-after release.

The Ghost is a dark affair.

As a matter of content, its themes are bleak, on the verge of total blackness. Loneliness, alienation, desperation, and dark, anxious nights. As a matter of atmosphere, the album is even darker. Surface noise has never been so important to a record's mood and tone. Yes, it sounds like it was recorded on a highway, but this is a dark fucking highway at a lonely, desperate hour and the only set of keys you have are those to the car that won't take you any closer to home. It's dead and you're scared and totally alone. It's just such an occasion that Jason Molina sings and plays of in a roundabout way on The Ghost. Recorded in one day direct to Jason's boom box with the tiny little microphone, this brand new batch of songs was written in a very short period in the early months of 1999. For Jason, fidelity was never an issue, in fact it was a tool. The boom box's inefficient battery-powered motor is just as integral to the recording as the vocal and guitar performance that occurred that February afternoon in Jason's room on his day off of work. This recording may be noisy but it is not a demo. It was originally made available in limited quantities--to be sold on the Songs: Ohia tour of the East Coast with Drunkin the Spring of 1999 and the European tour in the early Summer 1999, however Secretly Canadian recently discovered enough parts of this release to resurrect it one more time.

The title track the "About To Walk" ltd. ed. single is a Neutral Milk Hotel-fueled concoction of fuzzed synths, doubled bedroom beats and epic vocal harmonies. Also present are the upbeat handclapper "Lolita" and Elverum-esque "The Old Believer."

Conceived and fronted by Scott Reitherman, TMTS will release its debut full length, "Moonbeams" February 19th, 2008 on Secretly Canadian.

Before listening to Iron Curtain Innocence, Bobb Trimble welcomes you with a Tommy submachine gun salute -- trigger finger poised, guitar at ease and knees bent while alone at the microphone. It's a gesture only to be topped by his back jacket call-out: Dear John, Paul, George and Ringo, If I'm a good boy and work real hard, may I please be the 5th Beatle someday?

Born August 4, 1958 in Marlborough, MA, Bobb grew up in the Worcester suburb of Northborough feasting on the Beatles and later Bowie, Pink Floyd, and Queen. The music he went on to create wasn't an attempt to replicate the genius of those artists, but to stand alongside them with his own masterpiece of mythical, hysterical songwriting genius.

Bobb and Secretly Canadian are proud to present you with Iron Curtain Innocence and Harvest of Dreams, two releases that will now reach a genuine audience with full reissue treatment. This is great news for rare music lovers, since Bobb's original LPs are highly sought-after collectors items fetching hundreds of dollars apiece! Each CD release contains never before seen photos of Bobb Trimble, the Wormtown scene, and restored and fully realized artwork. In addition, each CD will feature bonus tracks from their respective recording periods. LP buyers won't miss out on these tracks, since each LP version includes a coupon for free MP3 download of the album -- including the bonus tracks. Enjoy.

Apart from maybe Jandek and Daniel Johnston, two other souls he could find comfort with, Bobb Trimble displays some of the 1980s' most honest, melancholic and moving American music. It's as if Melvin, Toxic Avenger's hero, had decided to go bedroom recording.

Born August 4, 1958 in Marlborough, MA, Bobb grew up in the Worcester suburb of Northborough feasting on the Beatles and later Bowie, Pink Floyd, and Queen. The music he went on to create wasn't an attempt to replicate the genius of those artists, but to stand alongside them with his own masterpiece of mythical, hysterical songwriting genius.

Bobb and Secretly Canadian are proud to present you with Iron Curtain Innocence and Harvest of Dreams, two releases that will now reach a genuine audience with full reissue treatment. This is great news for rare music lovers, since Bobb's original LPs are highly sought-after collectors items fetching hundreds of dollars apiece! Each CD release contains never before seen photos of Bobb Trimble, the Wormtown scene, and restored and fully realized artwork. In addition, each CD will feature bonus tracks from their respective recording periods. LP buyers won't miss out on these tracks, since each LP version includes a coupon for free MP3 download of the album -- including the bonus tracks. Enjoy.

Jens Lekman opens Night Falls Over Kortedala with the sure step of an artist in complete command of his creative self. Imbued with epic grandeur, "And I Remember Every Kiss" fades in with a melancholy timpani roll, a stirring string section and Jens crooning with every wistful bone in his body. After the first verse, the strings passionately swell into a wall of sound and - with one gravity-defying pass-through - Jens delivers his death blow to cynicism by declaring, "And I would never kiss anyone / Who doesn't burn me like the sun / And I remember every kiss like my first kiss;" illustrating just why many consider him one of the most important of the hopeful broken hearts coming of age in contemporary music. Like a modern day Chet Baker, Jens absolutely loves to sing about heartache.

On "Sipping On The Sweet Nectar", Jens introduces a dance beat to his string, horn & croon combo. And it only gets bigger from there with the tableside backbeat of "Opposite of Hallelujah" to the live favorite "A Postcard To Nina", and the slender hooks of "I'm Leaving You Because I Don't Love You" to the Frankie Valli purity of "Shirin" - an epic ode to Jens' barber which is reminiscent of a Mexican folk ballad.

Jens arduously labored over the songs on Night Falls Over Kortedala over the last three years between relentless tours (which ranged from full blown 8-piece ensembles to just Jens alone with a ukelele at the mic). Kortedala refers to a neighborhood in Jens' hometown of Gothenburg, Sweden, where his studio Koredala Beauty Center is located. It also refers to a vague musical pop sound with hints of tropicalia that has been coming out of Gothenburg's clubs over the last few years. Having more in common with Paul Simon's Graceland, Jens' latest is a response to more than an engagement in today's Kortedala music of his Swedish peers. An exercise in insularity, Night Falls Over Kortedala has achieved its specific sound not from going out but from Jens staying in and coming to grips with the sounds he had in his head, or as he said, "from the sound of my own voice reverberating off my home's old '50s brick walls, from the ghosts of everyone who's lived here before me clapping along with their little ecto-plasm hands. My record basically never leaves the 30 square meters that I live on until the very last song when i take a short bus ride to the countryside in 'Friday Night at the Drive-in Bingo'."

Night Falls Over Kortedala features Jens friendlies Frida Hyvönen and El Perro Del Mar.

The material embodied on Songs From Purgatory was recorded in vans, dank basements and tiny apartments in Grand Forks & Fargo, North Dakota using crappy microphones on an even crappier 4-track machine. This body of work showcases a songwriting and producing talent that perhaps was only commercially held back by its medium - one which he initially embraced as a matter of necessity, but eventually grew to deliberately embrace with the zeal of a lo-fi revolutionary. According to June, "Over time, I came to appreciate the sounds I was getting, and it dawned on me that recording in an expensive studio is not somehow inherently superior to 'lo-fi' recordings - it is simply a different medium."

Originally released as cassette-only albums on his own label 3 Out Of 4 Records, June's master tapes were almost destroyed in the Great Flood of 1997 that consumed Grand Forks. Over 200 master tapes sat submerged under the murky Red River water for several days in his parents' basement until saved through a painstaking cleansing process that is hilariously documented in the liner notes to this collection. Brought into this world by June, taken out by the Flood, then brought back by June, these songs have been re-mastered by the able hands of the iconic KRAMER.

Secretly Canadian is proud to present The Sojourner Boxset. It is the accumulated work of thirteen musicians, five locations, four recording engineers, three filmmakers, two designers and one songwriter, including enough material for three full lengths, one EP and one DVD. The boxset includes 4 CDs a DVD, a poster, postcards and a medallion.

The four CDs that are included in the boxset are from four distinct recording sessions that Magnolia Electric Co recorded following the release of their debut studio album What Comes After The Blues. The session known as Nashville Moon was recorded by Steve Albini at his Electrical Audio studios in Chicago, Illinois. The session known as Sun Sessions was recorded at the legendary Sun Studios in Memphis, Tennessee. The session known as Black Ram was recorded by David Lowery at his Sound Of Music studios in Richmond, Virginia and features an entirely different cast of characters including Lowery, Rick Alverson, Andrew Bird, Molly Blackbird, Miguel Urbiztondo and Alan Weatherhead. The session known as Shohola was recorded by Jason Molina alone, with a guitar and microphone. The Road Becomes What You Leave is a documentary film produced by Todd Chandler and Tim Sutton. It follows the band as they tour across the prairie provinces of Canada and shows the loneliness and isolation one can feel even when traveling in a pack.

Together, these make for the most ambitious and robust Magnolia Electric Co release to date.

Explore the celestial map of Jason Molina and the various constellations of his Magnolia Electric Co.

Five years is a long time. Five years is an excruciatingly long time for a band like Marmoset, who reside in a city referred to-often derisively-as Naptown. Somehow this band has managed to bottle into one album all of the idiosyncrasies and pathos that have made them the critically-acclaimed band we all love. Merging the Swell Maps-inspired tumultuous clamor of their debut EP Hiddenforbidden, the addictive two-minute anthems on Today It's You, and the epic joyful dirges from Record in Red, Florist Fired has it all.

Although principal songwriter Jorma Whittaker possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of Beatles-esque melodies, Florist Fired leaves listeners with the unmistakable feeling that Marmoset owes much more to a Richards-led Stones swagger- without the budget or access to premium pharmaceuticals. In contrast to the seemingly lecherous, self-loathing Whittaker gems, guitarist Dave Jablonski offers up detached ethereal odes like a man with his head truly in the clouds.

The idea of being a traditional, functioning band has never quite caught on with Marmoset. Their live shows and behind-the-scenes breakdowns are spiritually aligned with the likes of Brian Jonestown Massacre; but unlike BJM, the music you hear from Marmoset is pure sound vérité. No need for a ballyhoo project like Dig!- although the tales Marmoset could tell would certainly make for riveting viewing. Until the public is ready for such a trip into the madness, tension and ecstasy that is Marmoset, Florist Fired will serve quite nicely as their chariot on the road towards canonization .

David Vandervelde's debut full-length The Moonstation House Band (released on January 23, 2007) has been praised by critics, hailed as a stunning debut and a "glamorous, ambitious studio work" (CMJ). Mojo rejoiced in "the arrival of an eccentric talent whose head is firmly inclined toward the past" while NME claimed his work recalls "the best of T. Rex, ELO or early Bee Gees." Now, only six months after introducing David Vandervelde to the world with his debut 45 "Jacket", Secretly Canadian is presenting the album's lead-off track "Nothin' No" as the second single from The Moonstation House Band. A paean to young lust and getting high, "Nothin' No" is a modern rock classic that recalls the spirit of glam rock's most earnest & timeless teen anthems. Written & recorded almost three years ago when Vandervelde was 19 years old, it was put to tape in just one night at Jay Bennett's Pieholden Studio in Chicago. Vandervelde played all the instruments in an inspired frenzy that belied his age, displaying the maturity and swagger of a man much longer in the tooth.

Also included on this extended CD single are an alternate version of "Feet of a Liar" (recorded for Vandervelde's Daytrotter session at the end of 2006), a visceral new song called "Cute Pretender" and a beautiful Jimmy Page-esque instrumental called "Dancing Sea Gulls Instrumental".

This is the debut single from Richard Swift's new full-length Dressed Up For the Letdown for which Mojo had the following to say: "FOUR STARS. It's not stringently retro, more a Tin Pan Alley of the Imagination." The A-side is pure Swift ? a piano-driven pop tune sung with the moxie of a wizened songsmith. "So come on, love, nobody wants to see you cry," he sings. "All of your heartbreak has been sung." It's three minutes of wonder that takes you back thirty-five years to a classic era of smart L.A. pop music. Which makes the B-side so interesting, as it's Swift's sublime take on Prince's "Paisley Park" that jumps ahead a generation to cover the Purple One's late-80s under-appreciated gem. The second offering on the two-tune B-side is an ethereal tumbleweed of a number called "Cowboy Song #6". A Swift-penned out-take from the Dressed Up sessions, "Cowboy Song #6" finds Swift strumming his guitar, waiting for his train to come in, in whatever fashion it may take.

This is Secretly Canadian's 100th release, finally stamped and shipped out on its 11-year anniversary. But this isn't a 11-years-of-Secretly-Canadian-budget-blow-out-back-pat. That will likely happen with SC200, The Johnny Cougar Mellencomp. SC100 is more a suspended, freeze-dried nugget of evolution from those humbled beginnings everyone has. For those with a checklist of Hooiser Rock History, take note that SC is the first Indiana label to issue 100 titles. Daydreams are good when thinking of who came before ? BRBQ, 700 West, Lamp, Solid Gold or Gulcher ? and what they could've done if not for being corn-holed by that cruel economy of scales or packing up and leaving the state for brighter times. A few years past its inception, SC albums were never shrink-wrapped, sleeping space doubled as office space and the website address was garbled syntax of tildes and slashes unable to be translated over the phone.

All artists who issued recordings from SC01 (June Panic, Glory Hole) to SC99 (Swearing at Motorists, Last Night Becomes This Morning) were up for inclusion to cover a song by a label mate via the ol' names-in-a-hat method. So step back a bit just a few years and settle in or dust off those old SC albums to refresh with the originals. While the pre-SC100 discography is packed with Indiana heavies, there have been extended stays and shack-ups in Bloomington by most of the SC roster, be it a few days, or monthly rates at the College Inn, or even more permanent. No one wants to get hokey here, but this is a communal gathering, a family jamboree where each takes a turn, fugs it up a smidge, and pays homage to tourmates of past, or in some takes, to personal strangers. No need to rumble through each track with my own gander, but it's a gulp of life and worth every penny on this set to hear the swagger yell as Nikki Sudden tears into June's "See(ing) Double," just like an apparition of him strolling down Fourth Street, dressed like a million, and swiggin' a sack at 2pm. You wouldn't have seen that from the booth window, though Sudden did make his way down to that corner late one night.

Ativin is an instrumental group that formed in the winter of 1994 when guitarist Chris Carothers first met drummer Rory Leitch. Although originally conceived as a two piece, guitarist Dan Burton joined in the spring of 1995. The threesome began writing songs and touring in the Midwestern United States throughout 1995. In April of 1996 the band recorded the five song Pills Versus Planes CD EP with Steve Albini and Carl Saff. In December of 1996 Polyvinyl Records released the EP. Secretly Canadian quickly followed up the EP in February of 1997 releasing the "Modern Gang Reader" 7". The single showed the band departing from the aggression and distortion of Pills Vs. Planes and focusing more on rhythm and structure. During the summer of 1997 the band embarked on an East Coast tour with Seattle's Roadside Monument. In October of 1997 the band entered the studio with Andy Bryant and recorded the seven song LP German Water. Using added elements of organ, tapes and space Ativin has created an organic sounding album of shifting rhythms and tension.

Ativin's second full-length -- and first in 2 1/2 years -- is one ass-kicker of a record. Dan Burton and Chris Carothers have that rare chemistry which makes one question any auteurist theories, and in their stead seek out the magic that can come only with the process of collaboration. On INTERIORS, we get to watch as Ativin learns and then utters new languages, then reminisces with old. Yes, there are driving rock songs that have that signature Ativin groove, but they also have the more atmospheric moments which careen headlong into METAL MACHINE MUSIC territory and onward into campfire sing-alongs for dope-freaks. There is indeed some singing on this album, and thank goodness for that, as Carothers (who hasnÕt sung on record since the first Ativin EP PILLS VS. PLANES from 1996) and Burton (who also sings with his other band Early Day Miners) truly have something to say. Indeed, Burton and Carothers are two ships which pass in the night and annihilate weather patterns in the process. The album was recorded at Burton's Grotto Home Studio in the heat of the Indiana summer. Kevin Duneman (the Race, chiseldrillhammer) was enlisted as drum czar. INTERIORS is bound to tickle fans of everything from This Heat to Stars of the Lid to Zeni Geva.

The Panoply Academy formed in mid-1996. All its members came from bands who may someday end up on a Bloodstains Across the Midwest comp -- if anyone is able to uncover those lost records. WHAT WE DEFEND is the six-song follow up to their debut full-length RAH! The EP is a rock album, part MARGIN WALKER and part FLOWERS OF ROMANCE. Call it damaged art-punk, we've used that term before. Past musical comparisons to MX-80 and Smart Went Crazy have fallen short. Instead a holy, distinct and disjointed sound carries Panoply. Singer Darin Glenn's yodel and Marty Sprowles' neurotic guitar playing cut across WHAT WE DEFEND. Keyboardist Bekkah Walker's minimal, Monet-styled samples and beeps follow the ways of Pan Sonic, underlining the taut songs; whereas Nick Q's bass and Ryan Hicks' savage drumming grounds it all into a tight, sweaty basement uber-funk. And Panoply has enough spazz to satisfy the Gravity geeks and angular guitar for all the high-water pants in D.C.

Chris Barth re-emerges with A Double Gift Of Tongues to share once again Normanoak's mysterious fibrillation of heart and lung. Unbound from his share of duties with The Impossible Shapes, Barth chronicles a world "of acorns, blood, and sacrifice; of the holy hexagram of intertwined triangles; of the holy books writ in the sands of madness; Of the language behind language and the seeds of the unspeakable."

Barth's ability to chew up, unbuckle, and alternate between sanguine sanctity and life's whimsical playfulness has never shown itself in a purer light than throughout the 14 song landscape of this limited vinyl release. Fans of the inwardly mobile mysticism of Donovan or the soul damaged guitar skree of George Brigman's Jungle Rot in its most minimal state should book their ticket to A Double Gift Of Tongues immediately.

Richard Swift has confidently composed yet another original masterpiece; employing an archaic attitude of tempered restraint on a fresh collection of ten songs, without appearing shamelessly retro or kitschy. Playing a vast majority of the instruments on "Dressed Up" himself, by virtue Swift has created something that is characteristically his. And considering his rough-around-the-edges exterior, one could rightly assume that Swift desires the listener to accept him as an ordinary honest man with some honest songs -- unmasked blemishes and all. Yet when one engages with Swift on this narrow-road-less-traveled, one immediately ignores the subtle imperfections shadowed by the all-consuming white light of well-crafted pop songs in an analog heaven. In effect he's saying, "Just listen to my songs... the riffraff in the background is inconsequential." Sure Swift... whatever you say.

David Vandervelde appeared before us one hot summer day like a dynamo. The sound we heard coming through in stereo was that of our coming-of-age years screaming back at us - a faithful reminder that our beauteous days of bowing before pin-up rock stars and carving iconographic logos on desktops and in famous treetrunks have not passed us by. No, David Vandervelde is here to remind us that the truest, most primal and addictive properties of rock n' roll are ageless. Indeed, this Chicagoan (by way of the dunes of West Michigan) started recording this debut full-length at age 19 yet he shows the maturity and swagger of a man much longer in the tooth. Bearing an immediate resemblance to Marc Bolan and David Bowie, deeper listening rewards the listener with a much broader musical universe.

The Moonstation House Band album captures the highlights from his two-year immersion in Jay Bennett's Clubhouse - as Vandervelde refers to the studio in Chicago - where he isolated himself to record this record virtually on his own, using the former Wilco multi-instrumentalist's studio as a big toy instrument, enjoying access to much of the same gear as used on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and Being There. Self-taught on guitar, drums, bass, piano, synth, and other studio tools, the listener can hear that Vandervelde is an adventurous artist, who embraces classic rock songwriting and whose spirit is just banging at the door to get unleashed.

The Enemy Chorus is a hypnotic voyage through a largely aphotic locale with unpredictable bursts of light and sound ? perhaps amidst the heavens, or maybe under our own feet. While no less beautiful than their debut, this record carries a greater feeling of uncertainty, longing, anxiety, and sadness.

The group's production skills have been greatly refined ? at times, reminiscent of Nigel Godrich's great layered atmospheres. Though, the approach to recording is essentially the same, and the distinct "Earlies sound" remains intact. Their listening habits changed considerably between the recording of the two albums ? exploring the depths of progressive and krautrock. Influences range from the essential work of Faust, to prog greats Gentle Giant, to the musique concrete madness of Jean-Claude Vannier.

Produced in summer 2003 by Britt Daniel of Spoon, I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness' eponymous debut perfectly captures the band's strong pop-sensibility also found on their debut long-player "Fear Is On Our Side" from earlier this year. Included among the EP's five tracks is the live favorite and venerable set closer "Your Worst Is The Best" which features dueling vocals over a chiming Rhodes and epic guitar lines.

Had Brian Wilson owned a computer in 1967, he might have been able to make Smile on his own, thereby avoiding all the nonsense he had to endure from the other Boys of the band that led to the thirty-seven year wait before its completion.

Dave Fischoff's The Crawl is the product of a single creative mind.Armed with a rather large arsenal of obscure samples culled from his life as well as the entire Chicago Public Library sound collection, Dave went to work. Alone in a near downtown basement apartment (sometimes in his bedroom closet), his mind took a very long trip, delving into the under-explored territory where electronic music, hip hop, and orchestral pop meet. Taking cues from The Beach Boys and Burt Bacharach to The Postal Service and Public Enemy, Dave Fischoff has conceived, collected, cut and pasted, orchestrated and created a piece of work that is large and complex yet utterly personal and easily accessible.

David Vandervelde appeared before us one hot summer day like a dynamo. The sound we heard coming through in stereo was that of our coming-of-age years screaming back at us - a faithful reminder that our beauteous days of bowing before pin-up rock stars and carving iconographic logos on desktops and in famous treetrunks have not passed us by. No, David Vandervelde is here to remind us that the truest, most primal and addictive properties of rock n' roll are ageless. Indeed, this Chicagoan (by way of the dunes of West Michigan) recorded the A-side to his debut single a few years ago at age 19, yet he shows the maturity and swagger of a man much longer in the tooth. Bearing a resemblance to Marc Bolan and David Bowie on these two songs, we're eagerly anticipating his upcoming debut full-length, which will open the door into a much broader musical universe. Secretly Canadian is very proud to welcome David Vandervelde to the family.

Carving a path through the fertile land of Sweden, Frida Hyvönen is a talented piano-based songwriter in the vein of Laura Nyro with a passionate bite and a voice like an icicle that cuts deep. Recorded in the legendary Atlantis studio in Stockholm and co-produced with Jari Haapalainen, Frida's debut record, Until Death Comes features a raw home-recording feel not dissimilar to the Stones' Beggar's Banquet, Joni Mitchell's Blue or Carole King's Tapestry.Loved in her home country, she's just beginning to peek out into the rest of the world by touring in support of country-mates Jens Lekman, José Gonzalaz and the Concretes (who originally released Until Death Comes in Scandinavia on their own Licking Fingers imprint).

On his new album "And Now That I'm In Your Shadow", Jurado once again is calling us out to meet him. With the help of now permanent members Eric Fisher and Jenna Conrad, Damien has taken on a new side to his career. No longer is Damien Jurado just another solo artist but a band. Rarely from now on will any live performance just include a man with his ideas and guitar but a continuous collaboration in lyrics and sound creating a backdrop to a world that is filled with desperation and blessings, life discovered and life that is lost.

Together they will lead you into the lyrical world of the forgotten faces that you once knew. The songs are old friends and close relatives, quarreling loves and love lost, the very thoughts that cross your mind when you are alone or among the crowd. Forever in your shadow and trapped between the lines that you write down, Damien Jurado is still here and going nowhere

The Truth Doesn't Matter is Nikki Sudden's final album. Completed just a week before he left for his final American tour in March of 2006, there could not be a more perfect swan song for a man whose personal life and rock & roll life knew no boundaries. Nikki was glowing with excitement when he flew across the Atlantic for his final US tour. Not only was he ready to tour, but he was so pleased with the new album he had in his satchel, and had just completed his autobiography to boot. If Nikki's 49 well-lived years and 30+ years making music publicly could be summed up in any way, shape or form, it was in the two documents he had under his arm - one compact disc and one manuscript. While we may have to wait a while longer for the latter, we can now bask in the wonder of the former.

With all sentimentality aside, we will say that The Truth Doesn't Matter is the best album Nikki has made in over 20 years. But knowing that Nikki was never one to put sentimentality aside, we will unabashedly employ it when we assert that this is the best album of Nikki Sudden's career. Recorded in Berlin in the latter months of 2005, it was made on a steady diet of later period Marc Bolan glam, Rolling Stones' honky blues, Bobby Womack's soiled R&B, and '70s disco comps (with some repeated Isley Brothers doses). While the fifteen tracks on the album show these influences, more than anything, they reflect the flamboyance and wonderful character of a man who seems to have come from another time - a poet whose passion for the written word and delight in its expression in multiple forms was his life's dedication. This album is a celebration of music and friendship, and just seeps with Nikki's love for life. Listen closely and you may hear the hoofbeats approaching in this poet's head on album closer "All This Buttoning and Unbuttoning". Enjoy. He did.

After releasing the critically acclaimed EP Please Come Back early in 2006, Catfish Haven return more focused and more determined than ever to win your heart. You see with Tell Me, their debut full length on Secretly Canadian, these three raw dogs named for singer George Hunter's childhood trailer park home have crafted one hell of a break-up record. Love is a confusing thing and it always leaves the mind with more questions than answers. Who is this woman that left Hunter so broken that he was inspired to pen ten soulful odes to this traumatizing break-up? Who dumped who? Will Hunter ever win her back? It's hard to tell as Tell Me captures the confusion, denial, sleepless nights, and the desperate pleas for love that can only be felt when the mind gives up control to the heart.

Like Otis sweating out "Pain In My Heart" or Marvin begging "Please Stay", Catfish Haven are amongst few bands that can command a stage; keep a crowd up with a high energy live performance and still deliver such heartache. With the addition of smooth horn arrangements and even smoother back up vocals, Tell Me, is the realization of what a heartbroken boy can do when given a little time and recording studio full of toys. Graeme Gibson was in charge of capturing all of this onto tape at Clava Studio in Chicago, Illinois, the city the band calls home.

Jason Molina is not one to settle. Throughout his musical career of 12 plus years under his given name, Songs: Ohia and Magnolia Electric Co., he has lived in 9 different locations and has had a dozen different backing bands on record in as many different recording environments.

Fading Trails represents 3 of these incarnations and 4 of these environments. Composed of recording sessions Molina and company did with Steve Albini at his Electric Audio Studio, David Lowery at his Sound of Music Studio, and at the famous Sun Studio in Memphis, Tennessee, Fading Trails also features songs from the home recorded Shohola sessions. The essence of these recordings were extracted to create one cohesive being and thus defining what Magnolia Electric Co. truly is. Something that is hard to define. One head, multiple bodies...the opposite of a hydra head.

Over the course of the last decade Daniel Burton (the man behind Early Day Miners) has become one of the mid-west's best kept secrets. Mentored by Daniel Lanois at his Teatro Studio in Los Angeles, Burton has been putting his project-oriented stamp on a variety of records for the last 10 years. Anywhere from early Songs: Ohia recordings to tribal rumblings of On Fillmore (Glenn Kotche of Wilco's band with the venerable Darin Gray) to the pink noise and melodies of Windsor For the Derby, Burton's ideas and experiences with various bands in the studio have coalesced into this career-defining work, Offshore.

I wanted badly to revisit the type of songs I did on my more experimental albums The Pyramid/The Ghost/Protection Spells. I put this project together in the last days before I began what was a long and harrowing move back to Chicago. I wrote these songs as well as the half dozen or so that did not make it over the course of 3 mornings in Bloomington, Indiana and recorded them one after the other in the order they were written.

Originally released in 1996, Calm Hades Float is a timeless record that sounds like a dream collaboration of Martin Hannett and Brian Eno. Snaps of electronic drums collide with warm hum and reverb-drenched guitars on this ambitious release recorded by Adam Wiltzie of Stars of the Lid. This re-release also contains the '+/-' flexi that came with the first 750 vinyl copies, along with 2 previously unreleased live tracks.

Originally released on the legendary Austin label Trance Syndicate.

Veering from their debut, Minnie Greutzfeldt ? the band's sophomore album - is a study in nothingness. Also engineered by Wiltzie ? Minnie came on the heels of a Kramer induced world of rolling bass lines and oceanic reverb. The record is paired with the long lost Metropolitan Then Poland EP, a collection of home experiments with synths, scissors and drum machines.

Originally released on the legendary Austin label Trance Syndicate.

Not a band to sit still, our favorite Austinites, I LOVE YOU BUT I'VE CHOSEN DARKNESS have emerged from the big state by crossing the country several times over in support of "Fear Is On Our Side" and now releasing the first single from the record, "According to Plan."

Described by Res Magazine as an "ethereal anthem with a great bass hook and gently chiming guitars" (Res Magazine), the song transcends and destroys the generational gap that plagues so many bands these days who were influenced Joy Division and New Wave hookery.

The single also includes the Fear Is On Our Side out-take, "Close To Here," and the newly recorded piece, Better Strangers.

In case you haven't heard, 2006 will be the year of Danielson. The mammoth new Secretly Canadian full-length by the Southern New Jersey enclave, entitled "Ships" (produced by Danielson chieftain Daniel Smith), is being released May 9. Prior to its release, in March, three unique 7" singles will be released simultaneously on Anticon (with a song performed and produced by Why? and an album track remix by Christiaan Palladino), Kill Rock Stars (with two songs produced by Kramer) and Sounds Familyre (two songs recorded with Steve Albini). These singles will include non-album tracks and a remix. In contrast to the Br. Danielson album "Brother Is to Son" from last year, the songs on "Ships" are not solo songs, nor are they recorded without the help of his Famile. "Ships" is pure Danielson, created with the help of no less than 34 of Smith's closest friends and family members. See here a list of vital contributors:

1. Daniel Smith- Danielson2. Andrew Smith- the Famile3. David Smith- the Famile4. Megan Slaboda- the Famile5. Rachel Galloway- the Famile6. Elin Smith- the Famile7. Christiaan Palladino- the Famile8. Melissa Palladino- the Famile9. Lenny Smith- the Famile10. Lilly Smith- the Famile11. Ida Smith- the Famile12. Jedidiah Slaboda- the Famile13. Ted Velykis- The Ladytron / Leopulde14. John Ringhofer- Half-handed Cloud15. Greg Saunier- Deerhoof16. John Dieterich- Deerhoof17. Satomi Matsuzaki- Deerhoof18. Chris Cohen- Deerhoof19. Sufjan Stevens20. Josiah Wolf- Why?21. Yoni Wolf- Why?22. Doug McDiarmid- Why?23. Matt Meldon- Why?24. Brian and Amy- Miner Street25. Emil Nikolaisen- Serena Maneesh26. Tom Eaton- Goodeaton27. Steve and Dave- Gradwell28. Alan Douches- West Westside29. Ben Swanson- Secretly Canadian30. Darin Gray- Grand Ulena / Brice Glace / Dazzling Killmen31. Kramer- Bongwater / B.A.L.L.32. Steve Albini - Shellac33. Edith Frost<34. Jon Galloway- Soul-Junk

After a lifetime of nightfall and foggy moonlight, I Love You but I've Chosen Darkness creeps out of the shadows with their long-awaited full-length debut, Fear Is on Our Side. Formed in 2001, the Austin, Texas, band follows up their 2003 self-titled, five-song EP - a much poppier affair produced by Spoon's Britt Daniel - with a dose of thunder and lightning, pain and pleasure. Produced this time around by Paul Barker (Ministry, Revolting Cocks), the record is more sadness than joy with Christian Goyer's lonely lyrics and hauntingly echoed guitar persuaded by Edward Robert's chorused basslines. The sound is coaxing and familiar, Ernest Salaz and Daniel Del Favero's textured guitar melodies alternately subtle and entrancing; then howling and anguished. From opening tragic tale "The Ghost," the five-piece echoes past ages and foretells the future. Powerful layers rip through the silence, bonding strength and longing with the weight of a sigh.Reminiscent to latter-era Talk Talk, with the introspection also comes passion. "According to Plan" throbs and gristles through Tim White's pulsating beats that insist on movement. Originally electronically recorded for an Artikal Records 12-inch, the track comes alive here, just as tight as on the original but even darker. Mixing lulling instrumentals ("The Owl") with epic storytelling ("Today We Choose Faces"), ILYBICD breaks out of any genre-specific molds.Since 2001, Chosen Darkness (along with their local predecessors Paul Newman, Windsor for the Derby, and Glorium), have paid their dues by becoming THE band to play with in Austin. Now, it's time to put a sound with the name. Fear Is on Our Side is not trivial or banal. It's not trendy or futile. Fear is a testament to our times, our revolutions, and our meaning. It's timeless, maniacal, and resounding. Darkness and truth.

Whilst 2005's critically pumped Horus initiated escalation into a milkwood tapestry of a man vs. earth vs. spirit conceptual acorn, Tum, the 300 edition LP issued just months before is their most thoroughly realized confirmation of man as freedom as seed. Principal songwriters Chris Barth & Aaron Deer nefariously split that nut into mighty gush, fattening this garage cum psyche-chamber session enough to peel back grooves from the cornerstones of Shirley Collins' Folkways side False True Lovers to Bobb Trimble's Harvest of Dreams. Now reissued on unlimited CD, Tum is deliciously reborn for all. Formed in 1998 the Shapes -- Barth (guitar, vocalist), Deer (organ, bass) Jason Groth (guitar) and Mark Rice (drums) -- have kept a profoundly articulate sense of classic song/dream structure whether they are billowing in drenched multi-tacked gauze like Indianapolis forefathers Zerfas or snarled in amp-buzz annihilation of power-quartet stage performances. Easily the rawest tapes of the Shapes canon, Tum is a potent album, self-produced and directed to articulate a peak without contemporary parallels that easily rides against the sloshed chunks of bland neo-folk/whatevers that adds to the rising murk. As backup in the battle, original member Peter King, Amy Karr (The Mean-Agers) and Stefan Gabriel contribute throughout. These 17 songs/moments act like spell casting vessels...as hot-mouthed barefoot children with gloved fists pounding out the body-shuddering call of all to return, neck-deep, to the earth-cult. Time to carve some bark into a ticket and get in line. The wide umbrella of activity outside The Impossible Shapes stretches to each member's participation and full-on rolls in The Coke Dares (Essay Records), John Wilkes Booze (Kill Rock Stars), Barth's solo persona Normanoak (Secretly Canadian) and Deer's solo side Horns of Happiness (Secretly Canadian).

From the west coast bedroom pop beginnings of last year's A Sea As A Shore, Aaron Deer's (one half of The Impossible Shapes) one time solo project is now anchored with the drumming kaleidoscope of one Shelley Harrison on their latest 12" Would I Find Your Psychic Guideline. Now a duo, the Elephant Six foundations have given way to a treasure trove of pounding rhythms and repetitive organ lines not unlike New York's Oneida at their devilish best on Each One Teach One, or 20-odd years earlier when Philip Glass and Suicide brought the minimalist keyboard aesthetic to the rest of the world... but don't be mislead. This is a 12", not some overly heady art damaged Brooklyn piece of vinyl. It's corn-fed head-bobbin' music from the midwest...

With their first album since 2002's critically acclaimed This Flag Signals Goodbye, Swearing at Motorists return with a career-defining album. Last Night Becomes This Morning is frontman Dave Doughman's indie version of "Running On Empty". It was recorded on the road, between and while on tour in various locations - at soundchecks, in hotel rooms, rehearsal halls and on the bus (listen closely for the engine whine and the gears change). It is an album about two artists in love and how their craft keeps them apart. Last Night Becomes This Morning is a record of transition - and the confusion, discovery and understanding with which it comes. It is about a self-perpetuating myth. Where "Running On Empty" told of the battle to cope with fame & fortune, Last Night... chronicles the struggle to live life on the road in spite of lack of fame or fortune. In place of the sold out arenas its live sound comes in busking in an empty Berlin subway station - exile on Gipstraße. Dubbed the Two-Man Who by many a rock critic, Swearing at Motorists is an everyman record for the inner superman in all of us. File next to Thin Lizzy, The Replacements and Spoon. This needle-drop instant classic is the perfect Valentine's Day gift.

Antony & The Johnsons breakthrough album I Am A Bird Now has certainly touched fans and critics alike. His second full-length - released in February - stands as one of the most globally acclaimed albums of 2005. The album's latest single is the anthemic and heart-rending "You Are My Sister", presentedas a duet between Antony and Boy George. Together these two vocalists climb to the highest peakof emotional vulnerability, providing for the listener one of the most touching and uncanny duets of thepast decade. It's heartbreaking when Antony sings, "You are my sister / we were born / so innocent, sofull of need / there were times we were friends / but times I was so cruel / at night I'd asked for to watchme as I sleep". With soaring and world-weary intensity, Boy George utterly commands the refrain: "Youare my sister / and I love you / may all of your dreams come true." In "You Are My Sister," the pair singfrom the depths of their hearts for the world.This extended single also includes three new, unreleased songs recorded during the I Am A BirdNow sessions. "Poorest Ear" is a harrowing and complex vision from the perspective of an alienatedchild. Responding perhaps to "You Are My Sister," Antony sings of a girl who wishes to save her imperiledbrother in "Forest of Love." Finally, "Paddy's Gone" is a choral lament to long-lost man. Thesetracks all seem to support Antony's recent assertion; "Recently I have been imagining that we contain afamily inside us... a mother, a father, a boy, a girl and a baby. I Am a Bird Now represents a dialoguebetween some of these figures."The esteemed NPR program All Things Considered recently reviewed I Am A Bird Now injectingone of the most illuminate and apropos assessments yet, "This is a fantastic record. It's thoroughly modernbut feels lived in, it's got an old soul..."

Catfish Haven took its name from the rural trailer park nestled on the southern tip of Missouri where the trio's singer andmain songwriter, George Hunter, spent his early childhood. His father is a welder and, as with many trades, you must gowhere the work is. So the family packed up and left Catfish Haven for a Chicago suburb. It was there as a teenager thatHunter met future bandmates Miguel Castillo and Ryan Farnham. Their friendship was born out of a mutual love of skateboardingand music.After a few months and a move into the city, the three-piece stormed Chicago with a self-financed CD, complete with handmadebeer box covers, to begin spreading the gospel of "The Haven". Word travels fast in the Windy City's music scene,and soon Catfish Haven had intrigued enough people to be invited to play alongside the likes of My Morning Jacket,Daniel Johnston, Kings of Leon and Zwan, flooring audiences with the raw intensity of their live set. Akin to guitarists/vocalists like Bruce Springsteen and John Fogerty, Hunter, a howling crooner with gravel in his honey-sweetened voice (a la Sam Cooke), is known to strike his acoustic while stomping through each number. Castillo's pounding bass grooves are heightened when joined by Farnham's forceful, yet tasteful, drumming. Consider this: howling + pounding= smooth. An improbable equation that Catfish Haven has managed to make work.So this is it. The guys in Catfish Haven are who they are; there's no room for pretension here. They play their hearts outfor anyone who will listen 'cause they've got a love for music that drives them. And every note they play is intended torecapture those magical moments back at Catfish Haven.

Preceding his successful debut full length, When I Said I Wanted To Be Your Dog, Jens Lekman released into the world three little gems. Gems that didn't reach as far as the LP...but damn, were those perfect nuggets. First came Maple Leaves (a concise pop masterpiece with such poignant hits such as "Black Cab" and "Maple Leaves"), then came the Rocky Dennis EP (a more personal and bittersweet affair in which Jens celebrates and eventually retires his erroneous alter ego, Rocky Dennis, mistakenly given to him after a Swedish DJ happened upon an early demo of this recording), and You Are the Light (the perfect harmony between the previous two eps including the wondrous title track of horns, love and misdemeanors). And so, we offer this... ALL OF THEM ON ONE CD! We've filled up the space and present to you this collection of all three out-of-print eps as well as some hard to find out-takes from the harder to find Dept. Of Forgotten Songs.

Produced on both sides of the Atlantic and with a palette of sounds almost as wide; The Earlies debut album These Were The Earlies brings together their first self released singles and subsequent EP's. Originally released in 2004 on Names/679 Recordings in the UK, Secretly Canadian is proud to present this gem to the long-deprived people of North America.

Working with manipulated performances by a collective of English and American musicians These Were The Earlies combines layered vocals with imaginary and more traditional instruments to produce a unique pop sound where sonic exploration can still take place. Residing in Northern England and Western Texas The Earlies are united by a shared love of The Band, The Beach Boys, The Byrds, and The Beatles. All get a gracious nod on The Earlies debut album together with a unique mix of obscure psychedelic, progressive, leftfield and country influences. It's very apt that Brian Wilson has waited until recently to unveil his masterpiece Smile, it could be said The Earlies have provided us with the 21st Century equivalent. The variety of instrumental texture, layered harmonies and electronic tweaks - complete with a strong American lead vocal - could easily make The Earlies a Jason Pierce, Neil Young, and Phil Spector side project were they all decided to let their hair down and have a bit of fun for a change. Traversing some of the same territory inhabited by Deserter's Songs-era Mercury Rev and Olivia Tremor Control, The Earlies truly steer their own ship.

The Earlies lovingly crafted music is the culmination of many years posting and emailing ideas back and forth. They began releasing their own 7" records in the summer of 2002 and have developed into a full-blown live band, studio collective, and production team. Producing their own songs and successfully honing their chaotic 'whoever's available' studio approach to perform production duties for an increasingly impressive array of artists such as Micah P. Hinson, Leona Ness, and King Creosote under their Names On Records guise.

In the spring of 2004 the four core members of The Earlies got together for the first time, rounded up their mates and took to the road with an eleven-piece band. In the handful of shows they have done to date they have built an impressive reputation for their uncompromising set up, on stage banter and confident widescreen sound. From the first chance meetings in Texan record stores and Manchester watering holes to the triumphant, team sized, live show The Earlies believe their "musically simple - sonically tricky" approach should always be entertaining.

The Earlies are Giles Hatton (Manchester), Christian Madden (Burnley) for the English half, and John Mark Lapham (Abilene) and Brandon Carr (Dallas) for the Texan other half.

"Working class rock" is a phrase used frequently to describe The Magnolia Electric Co. Categorically, the band has secured their place amongst like-minded icons such as Bob Seger, CCR, Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen, but it's not merely an aesthetic description. Magnolia back it up with their work ethic. This recording will be their third proper release in 2005 - after Trials And Errors (Jan. 18) and What Comes After The Blues (April 15). Amazingly, The Magnolia Electric Co. will have been on the road eight months by the year's end. This fact is most apparent to the band members themselves having been away from their homes and their loved ones for such extended periods of time. Hence the significance of the title track. When Jason Molina assumes the perspective of the one he left behind on "Hard To Love A Man and sings:

It was hard to love a man like you / Goodbye was half the words you knew / While you were waiting for me not to call / I sent my love

The loneliness and guilt of separation is painfully obvious. The wounded feminine voice of Jennie Benford, coupled with Jason Groth's sweeping guitar and Mike Kapinus' mournful organ dramatically reiterate this sentiment. Mark Rice and Pete Schreiner deliver their signature tight and tasteful rhythm and Nicole Evans adds a new and dynamic voice. While "Hard To Love A Man" and live set favorite, "Werewolves Of London" were recorded with Steve Albini at his Electrical Audio Studios, the rest of the tracks were recorded during a brief five day visit home in Indiana at Echo Park Studios with Paul Mahern whose engineering resume includes The Blake Babies, Lisa Germano and John Mellencamp.

As we watch Magnolia grow, Jason Molina doesn't have to coach us through another one, letting the inmates run the asylum. The Magnolia Electric Co. cast no doubt by putting their business in the street.

Catfish Haven is the trailer park in Missouri where singer/songwriter/guitarist, George Hunter, grew up.

Catfish Haven the band currently resides in Chicago, Illinois where they create soulful howling music over an acoustic guitar turned way up. Resurrecting the spirit of Otis Redding and tapping into the vein of Credence Clearwater Revival, Catfish Haven's music is imbued by hopeful yearning for better days echoed through amps and a drum kit.

We realize that you've never heard of Richard Swift. We here at Secretly Canadian will change that. In fact, Richard Swift will consume your life. "The Collection Vol. 1" is a great place to start. The Novelist ? Swift's highly acclaimed, succinct, eight song, nineteen minute and thirty-eight second-long, audiophile archivist experiment ? immediately ushers the listener deep into the recesses of Swift's creative core for a kaleidoscopic trip aboard an intergalactic vaudevillian steamship with a speakeasy code-word. Yet, The Novelist is only one small manifestation of Swift's entire musical manifesto and only one-half of this double-disc set. Walking Without Effort ? the second disc in the two-disc set ? is the first, and perhaps most deceptively complex, yet decisively understated, Swift release to date. A slight step eastward from the eclectic musings of The Novelist, Walking Without Effort intentionally paints another image, and baptizes believers born-again into Swift's unique brand of sonic schizophrenia. Gramophones are replaced by 8-tracks and Persian rugs are covered with shag, as Swift nods to the early 70's solo efforts of McCartney and Harrison, while waving to Burt Bacharach and Van Dyke Parks. They're just passersby as he drives down main street in a Rolls Royce Silver Shadow. Don't be scared, be excited that Swift intends on writing and releasing music until the day he dies and intends to never make the same record twice... not even on a double-disc.

Windsor for the Derby are a study in dualities. It is made of two primary band members preserving not only a musical identity but a friendship over many years and many miles. Creating music that is equal parts dance and folk, a truly disparate combination of styles that come out sounding completely organic. While listening to "Giving Up The Ghost", you hear not only the beautiful stylistic tension of two styles at play, but also the room and atmosphere itself. Windsor's music has always been a play on modern pop, infused with giant amounts of space, a space which both reflects the physical distance between its members as well as providing an artistic counterpoint to the massive inundation of noise and data that our society is bombarded with daily.

The past eleven years have seen Windsor For The Derby reach across the country and make the long distance relationship somehow work. With founding members Jason McNeely in Austin, TX and Dan Matz in various locales along the east coast, WFTD always seemed more a "project" than a band. Last summer both found themselves living in the same city as they both relocated to Philadelphia. In the past WFTD had to rely on their semi-annual meetings to conduct their business, but now they are regularly playing live shows and prolifically recording in their home studio.

On the second single from Antony & The Johnson's "I Am A Bird Now", Antony presents one of the strongest solo pieces in his staggeringly rich repertoire. The song "Hope There's Someone" is a rush of pure emotion, a true performance with every bit of hope, supplication, distress, horror, lament, agony, sorrow and accession, spanning the entire life-death experience. Pitchfork characterizes the song remarking, "It starts all atremble with a disarmingly naked prayer ("Hope there's someone who'll take care of me when I die, when I go"). As the song progresses that someone changes shape, and becomes a spectral double, as Antony sings for and against himself; the hoped-for someone is both a loving companion and an exterminating angel." The esteemed NPR program All Things Considered recently reviewed "I Am A Bird Now" injecting one of the most illuminate and apropos assessments yet, "This is a fantastic record. It's thoroughly modern but feels lived in, it's got an old soul, and honestly for as often as the term "soulful" gets tossed around like table salt on so many flavorless records, for once, for Antony and the Johnsons the term aptly describes." Two of the three songs are previously unreleased outtakes from the "I Am A Bird Now" sessions. The single also contains a new video for "Hope There's Someone" by the up-and-coming NYC director Glen Fogel. The video, and cover art, features a captivating portrait of the NYC legend Joey Gabriel.

The long-awaited reissue of the debut full-length by THE pre-eminent noise-rock/post-hardcore band from the Midwest. Having been crowned one of the most important noise bands to watch by almost every important underground music publication and fans alike, Racebannon have been working hard on their next full-length for the past two years. In the meantime, their first full-length (originally released on Level Plane Records and out of print since 2001) has been impeccably remastered and made available on compact disc for the first time ever with three bonus tracks. An awesome debut, First There Was the Emptiness captures the band at a time when they had two vocalists and were at their hungriest and most anxious to prove themselves. On this album, Racebannon established themselves as an instantly important group with an enormous amount of audacity and personality. No other band was able to so fluidly terrorize their audience while luring them in for more - while attracting a crowd that normally paid no mind to avant-hardcore music. In their wake they left many a neutered punk-rock club, yet they kept getting invited to play at new clubs. Such is the paradox of Racebannon. The band is a cross breed of Gravity hipsters Antioch Arrow, Captain Beefheart/Mr. Bungle controlled spontaneity, Melvins/Blue Cheer sludgy heaviosity, and Melt Banana-like noisy spazz.

There comes a time in every artist's career when he disconnects himself from the public. Fans, friends, critics, they'll all be left behind in the creative process; maybe for only a spell, maybe forevermore. When that break happens, it's both liberating and terrifying. With On My Way To Absence, Damien Jurado has made such a break. He hung up the phone and left it lying there on the counter, and in the process has created a quintessential Jurado piece of work; a masterpiece by one of today's most incredible voices.

Stripped of any inclination or genre-adopting (his past albums deliberately each wore a different cloak: Waters Ave S's pop, Rehearsals For Departure's folk-rock, Ghost of David's ambient-experimentalism, I Break Chairs' rock, and Where Shall You Take Me?'s americana), On My Way To Absence is the sound of Jurado and long-time collaborator Eric Fisher locked in a mental space for four months, periodically inviting friends (including Rosie Thomas, Crooked Fingers frontman Eric Bachman, and familiar faces Josh Golden, Seth Warren, David Broecker, Casey Foubert and Andy Myers) in to contribute to the piece, but ultimately just the two of them immersed in the canvas. Stripped of a hope to please, Jurado journeyed inward and veered into darker and darker territory. On My Way To Absence has ultimately become what Jurado refers to as "a tribute to jealousy". It approaches a dangerous ledge and by the album's end, with the powerful "A Jealous Heart is a Heavy Heart", the listener is left somewhat dangling in a scary place. In the past, Jurado may have been concerned with leaving listeners in such a precarious position, but the beauty of On My Way To Absence is that it does not make such calculations. It just builds & builds, raccoon-eyed & bleary. When the needle raises at the end of side two, one wonders if there'll ever be another side. This is the sort of story that is created in an artistic vacuum, the sort of insularity that artists such as Jandek and the Microphones have creating wonderful albums within. It's a dark portrait that would fit well on the plaster walls of a Fassbinder home, right next to Lou Reed's Berlin in terms of sheer emotional audacity. He finds the quick truth, the good stuff, and he sings it from his gut. Such is the magic of Damien Jurado.

On the heels of Magnolia Electric Co's recent limited edition live release, the raw and incendiary Trials and Errors, comes what is perhaps Jason Molina's most fully realized studio project yet. Recorded live-in-the-studio by Steve Albini, What Comes After the Blues captures the simpatico chemistry of Molina's touring band, crackling with connective electricity that can only be generated by the mutual experience of the road. On the writing end of the equation, the song cycle of What Comes After the Blues is a conscious step forward for Molina in songwriting approach and intent. Most of the songs on it were written and arranged on the band's recent relentless touring of Europe and North America. The current incarnation of Magnolia Electric Co is the fullest and longest-running band the former Songs: Ohia frontman has formed so far. These musicians fashion kinetic and organic underpinnings for Molina's thematic quests, with arrangements that carry a primal feel for poetic American rock. In the tradition of Bob Seger, Tom Petty, John Fogerty, Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen and Ronnie VanZant, Molina is revered as being very personal songwriter who is unafraid to be vulnerable in song. And, like those artists, in Magnolia Electric Co, he has his Silver Bullet Band, Heartbreakers, CCR, Crazy Horse, E-Street Band and Skynard to balance the personal nature of the work with rock & roll of just such a collaborative and sublime nature that it defies being pigeon-holed as folk.

There is a myth that great artists operate in seclusion. One need look no further than to the ten songs of Antony and the Johnsons' new album, I Am A Bird Now, to realize this is an utter fallacy. To be sure, with his androgynous features, the singularly named Antony is an original. Have you ever heard a voice like this, imbued with the transcendental emotion of the blues, yet deployed with an unadorned simplicity reminiscent of medieval music practice, and graced with a top note of childlike wonder? Or songs that blur distinctions of gender and identity, yet which still summon up such powerful feelings: longing, love, lust, loss? No. Because Antony is one-of-a-kind. But he is certainly not alone. We are proud to present you with a record filled with one of the most gifted voices heard in a long time. Antony's vocals are almost inhuman, coming together to compile a creature that's as beautiful and enigmatic as the Peter Hujar photo, Candy Darling on Her Deathbed, that graces its cover. The lead-off single to I Am A Bird Now, "Fistful of Love" is perhaps Antony & the Johnsons' finest work to date. It features a scorching horn section and subcultural icon Lou Reed on vocals and searing lead guitar. In the tradition of subversive soul classics The Crystals' "He Hit me (And It Felt Like a Kiss)" and Millie Jackson's "Hurts So Good," Antony sings this ode to getting the shit kicked out of you and learning to love every minute of it. The complex emotional undertow of this track reaches a cathartic roar by the song's finale. Antony shifts from a tremble to a wail ? a tempest of emotion. I Am A Bird Now also includes contributions from friends Boy George (duet with Antony on "You Are My Sister"), Devandra Banhart (vocals on "Spiralling"), and Rufus Wainright (lead vocals on "What Can I Do").

The Impossible Shapes is a quartet from the southern reaches of Indiana featuring bass/keys-man Aaron Deer, guitarist/bassist Jason Groth, drummer Mark Rice, and songwriter/singer/guitarist/polemicist Chris Barth. Horus is the group's fifth proper full-length album since 2000 and the one that takes the clues and abstractions of all previous and encapsulates them as a monumental and subversive vessel. At point-A we have a classic album from a post-Aquarian world that would be on the electric side of Bert Jansch's Pentangle or Fotheringay. Then from point-B Barth takes a lyrical journey that saunters against the slim lines of magickal romance, demon chasing, Pan, and vile humanistic impulses that reads of equal parts Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Aleister Crowley. His litanies on discovery and shadowy desires of hedonism and courtly love line each song with a tint of naturalistic folk force and free will. A swell of grandeur appears across this song cycle, morphing out of the delicate hill-side inflected guitar melodies into miniature cathedral celebrations. An association of fellow travelers exists within the songs evoking the ancestral pull of early Pink Floyd and a non-acoustic Incredible String Band changing milk-into-gold with their dark brethren Comus. The wide umbrella of activity outside the Impossible Shapes stretches to each member's participation and full-on rolls in Songs: Ohia/Magnolia Electric Co, The Coke Dares, John Wilkes Booze, Barth's solo persona NormanOak and Deer's solo side Horns of Happiness, though no thinning of blood is found within Horus. The magical spells cast song-by-song grow with each moment that they are set free with every listen.

Early Day Miners are back with another platter of Midwest post-goth. Having already introduced their new rhythm section (Matt Griffin on drums and Jonathan Richardson on bass) to the world over the course of their last two tours, with All Harm Ends Here EDM have combined the lushness of their second album Let Us Garlands Bring with the conciseness of their last full-length Jefferson At Rest. Moreso than on any of their previous efforts, they take both musical and tonal cues from the principal architects of the 80's sad-as-hell dark underground ? Echo & the Bunnymen, the Church, early-the Cure, and most notably the Bauhaus/Tones On Tail/Love And Rockets axis. While contemporaries like Bedhead and Interpol have mined primarily the darkest aspects of these long shadows, there lies in Early Day Miners' method an innate sense of hope that transcends even their darkest themes (decay, suicide, desertion). Perhaps this is most evident in the guitar interplay of long-time collaborators Dan Burton (Ativin) and Joseph Brumley. Arpeggios abound, the works of Roger McGuinn and The Edge come to mind in that there is a sense of hopefulness and sublimation which drives the songs to a better place.

Conceived as an introduction to Antony & the Johnsons' new full-length I Am A Bird Now (due 2/1/05 on Secretly Canadian), The Lake consists of three songs, including the lead-off single to I Am A Bird Now. The song is "Fistful of Love" and is Antony & the Johnsons' finest work to date. Featuring a scorching horn section and the legendary Lou Reed on vocals and lead guitar, the song's clear star is Antony. His lead vocal performance is bone-chilling. Reminiscent to that of the late Otis Redding, he sings: I accept and I collect upon my body, the memories of your devotion. I feel your fist. And I know it's out of love. He shifts from a tremble to a wail ? a tempest of emotion. Antony and Reed are no strangers to one another. As a member of Reed's band, Antony accompanied him on his 2003 world tour as a vocalist. There Antony was featured as the lead vocalist on the Velvet Underground classic "Candy Says" as well as Reed's solo classic "Perfect Day". These performances are documented on Reed's latest double-live album Animal Serenade. Antony also contributed vocals for Reed's most recent album, The Raven.

The Lake also features two previously unreleased songs. Starting off with the spare "The Lake," on which Antony breathes new life into a poem by Edgar Allan Poe. An in-concert favorite, a live version of this song was also featured on Devendra Banhart's Golden Apples of the Sun new folk compilation (Bastet) from earlier this year. Less orchestrated than Antony & the Johnsons' self-titled debut (recently re-released by Secretly Canadian on July 20, 2004), it shows a confidence & maturity that many fans in New York City have grown to love in his work. Closing with "Horror is Gone," Antony plays his darker imagery against a backdrop of hope.

It's a special thing when you're hearing new Damien Jurado songs for the first time. May you be sitting someplace comfortable for your first time with the five new songs on Just In Time For Something. It's a really beautiful little postcard from Damien's neck of the woods. Self-recorded during a long weekend using a '67 tube-powered reel-to-reel which Damien picked up especially for this EP, these new tunes sound like Alan Lomax field recordings from the mid-60's. Listening to the EP, it feels as though Damien's just in the other room, on the other side of the door, playing new songs and hitting them spot on for the first time. You can hear him catch his stride and lose himself in these beautiful songs. His voice is that of an angel. Just as Nick Drake was able to convey that complicated sense of uplifting sorrow in his songs and in his voice, Jurado has both the songwriting and the performance gift. "Motion Sickness" is vintage Jurado, with its love tale wagging slowly before you. Jurado's new full-length "On My Way to Absence" will be released in early 2005.

Presented in reverse chronological order, even the sequence is representative of the band's de facto "nothing good ever comes easy" work ethic. The Panoply Academy spent the better part of a decade as central Indiana's most challenging & compelling bands. Going through a handful of member ? and thus slight name ? changes, the Panoply Academy have infected basements across the country over and over again having begrudgingly drawn comparisons to Pere Ubu, Sonic Youth, U.S. Maple, Brainiac and from time to time even Wire with an attention span. The one thread running through all of the comparisons is that the band is difficult to pin down. The fact is ? like these other bands ? Panoply defies categorization. As with many bands of their era, their best recorded works have been scattered in the global wind not in the form of proper albums, but rather in the form of singles and countless compilation tracks. Everything Here Was Built to Break includes every one of those non-album tracks that the Panoply Academy has released since its inception in 1996, from every wave of their career (including the Glee Club, Corps of Engineers and Legionnaires). Arguably even more important than all these songs finally collected together, Everything Here Was Built to Break begins with the fabled "lost album" ? the five songs recorded during their last session in 2001. Three of these have never been released, while the other two come from perhaps one of the last perfect 7"es ("Nocturnally Yours" / "Diurnally Yours"). Recorded to a 1" 6-track (as two of the eight tracks just happened to be malfunctioning that week) by LonPaul Ellrich, these songs finally captured the band's live energy that made them the fan favorite for every young scrapper who has been lucky enough to see them perform on their dozen tours across the US between 1996 and 2001 in which they played every sweaty basement DIY club in the midwest and on both coasts. The Panoply Academy's members have played in other bands of note: Nick Quagliara & Marty Sprowles (Turn Pale), Pete Schreiner (Songs: Ohia, The Coke Dares, Scout Niblett), Ryan Hicks (Measles Mumps Rubella). "The Panoply Academy have chosen a promising stylistic platform ? vintage avant-kookiness, heavy influence from mid-period Pere Ubu's particular synthesis of Beefheart's Cubist Delta Blues, Yoko Ono's arch taffy-pill vocals, and England's more polemic post-prog extremism a la Henry Cow. And MX-80's recension of related materials." ? Your Flesh

Nikki Sudden's first proper album since 1998's Red Brocade, Treasure Island is a stunning achievement. It includes Sudden's best songwriting in twenty years and boasts an all-star line-up of rock & roll hall of famers Ian McLagan (the Faces) and Mick Taylor (the Rolling Stones), as well as Terry Miles (Bernard Butler), Dave Kusworth (Jacobites), and Anthony Thistlethwaite (the Waterboys). With his motley band of expatriates exiled to Germany The Last Bandits (John Clifford Barry on bass and Stephane Doucerain on drums), Sudden & Co. crossed the German border into the UK and set up shop at John Rivers' WSRS studio in Leamington Spa, a home away from home where Sudden has recorded a vast majority of his work during his extensive 30-year career -- which spans his pioneering early work as a founder of the Swell Maps (whose two studio albums are being reissued on Secretly Canadian in late October), his albums with the revered Jacobites, over a dozen solo albums and the dark masterpiece Kiss You Kidnapped Charabanc, his 1987 collaboration with Rowland S. Howard. "In true pirate tradition [Treasure Island] nails its colours firmly to the mast. Sure, there's a powerful Stones influence on 'House of Cards', but it's Mick Taylor himself guesting on guitar; and if elsewhere there's an enthusiastic nod in the direction of The Faces, well, yep, that's Ian McLagan on keyboards. BJ Cole and ex-Waterboy Anthony Thistlewaite show up on pedal steel and sax, and there's even a female choir. Despite the star guests, it's always Nikki's album -- one part Bolan swagger to two parts Keith Richards riffs -- and it's one of his best." -- Mojo

Scout Niblett's new EP kicks off with her unique rendition of live favourite "Uptown Top Ranking" (originally a hit on the UK pop charts in 1978 by reggae group Althea & Donna). As usual, she infuses the song with her own signature sense of passion & play, and carrying it all is her incredible voice which Venus magazine described as "a full-bodied caterwaul that could rival Gillian Welch, Neko Case, and even Johnny Cash." The second song "Dare" is perhaps her most assured step toward pop music, motioning toward the table at the party where Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush are lost in conversation.

Call it a curse. Jens Lekman's is a world populated by an endless stream of women. But not just any sort of women. No, these are the sort of women that inspire the most joyous of heartbreak in your mild-mannered crooner. There he is: hair mussed & glasses off-kilter, sitting in the corner of the cafe with his journal bookmarked once again; like Truffaut's The Man Who Loved Women, Jens Lekman is a man forever at a crossroads between competing inspirations. Some of the women have names (Silvia, Lisa, Julie, Maria); some don't (the chili cook in The Cold Swedish Winter, the bread baker in the title track, the make out artist in A Higher Power, for example). It's all part of Lekman's story. He loves to fixate on inspiration and has a special gift for not only finding it, but spreading it. His songs are each so different stylistically, each a classic in its own way. He employs each of the following as central features in his songs: horn sections, string sections, a capella singing, steel drums, piano balladry, and mandolin. Lekman is a young pop crooner from Göteborg, Sweden. Eyes bright, heart wide open, he's become an overnight sensation with his home recorded magic and fantastic lyrics. It's hard to believe that he is only 23. He could as well be playing Las Vegas. His timeless elegance makes the big, beautiful suburban pop songs sound like they're already classics. Which they are. He recently hit #2 on the Swedish national pop charts for the title track to this EP. Most everyone who's heard him believes him to be the next great pop star emerging from the streets of the DIY underground. With an angelic voice and golden ears he seems to be drinking from the same hard waters as the Carpenters, Harry Nilsson, the Magnetic Fields, Smog, the Modern Lovers and Belle & Sebastian.

Opening with all the pomp of a ferocious episode of The Price is Right, You Are the Light finds Jens Lekman in full effect, ditching the samples in favor of ? gasp! ? real musicians performing in a real studio. Jens even flew to Denmark to work with the pre-eminent Horn Quartet of continental Europe. You Are the Light showcases the blossoming of a master songwriter discovering his voice & his method in the most classic sense. Just as pop stars Serge Gainsbourg, Scott Walker and Prince segued from their early work into their more wildly iconoclastic periods, You are the Light signals not only a birthing for Jens, but also the end of an era for him. On this EP, we also find Jens at perhaps his most vulnerable, the spare "A Man Walks Into A Bar", is essentially just Jens and a mic ? nada mas. This EP serves as a coda to his upcoming debut full-length When I Said I Wanted To Be Your Dog, having been recorded at the tail end of those album sessions, and, ultimately, it gives a small insight into where this burgeoning maestro is going. Lekman has been called "the latest and possibly greatest Scandinavian export... A modest commercial success in his homeland and a genuinely compelling artist, as evinced on the Maple Leaves EP and Rocky Dennis EP. Perched at the center of an unbelievably lush swirl of strings and background cooing, Lekman comes very close to evoking the early solo work of John Cale." (Paste Magazine)

This year Windsor for the Derby celebrates its tenth year with the release of its fifth full length, We Fight Til Death. Over those ten years Dan Matz, newly relocated to Philadelphia, and Jason Mcneely, from Austin, have managed to arduously maintain this project over the many miles. Those years have seen personnel changes with much help along the way by their talented friends. Over the last few years, Timothy White and Ben Cissner have jumped on board to lend their invaluable assistance to WFTD and helped to create a solid quartet. We Fight Til Death finds WFTD in Bloomington, Indiana with Dan Burton (Early Day Miners, Ativin) at the controls. This record was recorded and mixed over the last year at Burton's Grotto Home Studio with Burton and a few other locals sitting in. WFTD finds a way to take each release to a wholly different trajectory while at the same time creating a progressive connection to the last. The skewed pop sensibilities of The Emotional Rescue LP are hinted at on We Fight Til Death as well as the dark refrains of 1998's Minnie Greutzfeldt. By combining elements of previous releases and exploring new terrain, We Fight Til Death is Windsor For The Derby's most realized release to date.

Antony and the Johnsons present chamber cabaret in darkest blue, creating music that is highly dramatic, emotional, and lyrical. Compared to everyone from Nina Simone to Lotte Lenya, Antony's voice is hauntingly evocative. The Johnsons, an ensemble featuring a string trio, piano, bass and drums, lay a foundation of lush yet minimal orchestral arrangements. Antony & the Johnsons is a reissue of the group's debut album, which was originally released in 1998 on the London-based label Durtro, which is run by David Tibet of Current 93. It was followed by the EP I Fell in Love with a Dead Boy EP, which includes a cover of David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti's "Mysteries of Love." Antony accompanied Lou Reed as a part of his band on his 2003 world tour, on which Antony sang lead vocals on the Velvet Underground classic "Candy Says". It, as well as several other songs on which Antony sings back-up vocals, was documented on Reed's latest double-live album Animal Serenade. Antony also contributed vocals for Reed's most recent album, The Raven.

The Horns of Happiness are all around you. Stretching across the countryside and delving into the deepest sea, they create and are created by all existence. They can be found in boisterous days of celebration and rebirth along with the quiet whispers of defeat and loneliness. A song to lift your feet through uncountable joy and complete distress. In this case, The Horns are interpreted almost entirely by songwriter Aaron Deer as he has witnessed their actions and reactions throughout 2001 and 2002. As core member of both the Impossible Shapes and John Wilkes Booze, Deer has established himself as a feroucious live performer and inventive collaborator in the studio. For his second album utilizing the Horns of Happiness moniker, he showcases his prowess on virtually every instrument. Like a glorious pillow fight in the heavens between Paul & Linda McCartney and Grandaddy, A Sea As A Shore is full of fuzzed out psychedelic pop songs composed with acoustic & electric guitars, pumping organs and dreamy vocals. They are interspersed with instrumental interludes where pianos mingle, banjos bark and tape loops shuffle. Built upon simple, spontaneous parts, and sculpted onto the tape, the songs as a whole take the listener by the hand guiding him to the revelation that music can transport the listener to another place. Fans of Maher Shalal Hash Baz, the Microphones and the Olivia Tremor Control will find a good friend in A Sea As A Shore.

NormanOak is Chris Barth. Born A Black Diamond is NormanOak's debut ? a wind chipped, folk meditation on the universe's creation, mycology, the Tree of Life and a bit of Aleister Crowley mysticism. It was recorded over the 2002-2003 winter while NormanOak's band the Impossible Shapes (in which he is the songwriter, lead vocalist, and plays guitar) were sequestered in the forest outside of Bloomington, Indiana, recording their fourth album We Like It Wild. Born A Black Diamond was recorded during the evening down-times onto cassette tapes in various hallways, bedrooms, and basements that were ceremoniously charged with magickal energy following each session. It is a self-recorded time capsule with only a little help from whoever happened to be supplying that night. As a fervent backpacker and wayward trail guide, NormanOak was able to employ a host of wild animal dealers and friends on these recordings to bring them to life, such as Eric "The Panther" on vocals and Andrew "The Black Bear" on drums, among others. Barth takes a similar free-spirited hippie wanderer approach on Born a Black Diamond that psychedelic forefathers like Donovan and Marc Bolan's Tyrannosaurus Rex took a few decades earlier, a time when NormanOak was pecking the trees. Though inside the strums and animal claws, there is a complexity, a sap that has flown from the leaves of Ya Ho Wa 13 and Robert Wyatt. He takes great pride in his use of the 4-track (which has been squashed over the past several years due to the ubiquity of digital recording), which may be enjoying a renaissance of sorts as like-minded artists like Iron & Wine, Devendra Banhart and The Blithe Sons have been making champions of albums with its use in the past two years.

This album has been a long time coming for Daniel Smith. It's been ten years now since the first recorded Danielson album (A Prayer for Every Hour). Danielson head chief and eldest sibling Daniel Smith has always tried to keep the Danielson music making fluid and therefore things have evolved. While it all clearly started as his baby which he wrote and then directed with the help of his siblings, the Danielson Famile of New Jersey has naturally become more and more of a collaboration and a group over the course of five full-lengths (the latest of which was 2001's Fetch the Compass Kids). As the Danielson Famile was coming together, Daniel wrote "Tri-Danielson!!!", splitting Danielson into three sides. The idea was to honor the Danielson Famile by continuing to collaborate more and also give Daniel a place to write and play his other songs. Br. Danielson ("Brother Danielson") is this place.On this sixth Danielson release, the entire Famile (siblings Andrew, David, Megan, and Rachel; wife Elin; friends Christian & Melissa Palladino; daughter Lilly) as are familiar co-conspirators (father Lenny, Sufjan Stevens, John Ringhofer and Ted Velykis) are all here supporting Daniel.On "Brother is to Son", all the special-ness that the full band brought to previous Danielson albums is fully present. The earnest vocal chirp of head Danielson himself is still there, not to mention the empassioned and punk-inspired hard strum of his acoustic guitar. He still leads his folk jamboree through the familial boy-girl harmonies as the banjos, bells, piano keys and jaw harp all teem with kinetic energy, like a deconstructionalist jug band led by a man who follows in the bold footsteps of Sun Ra, Don Van Vliet and Johnny Lydon as a truly original art terrorist.What is unique about this new window into the Danielson brain-cage is its pervasive tenderness, most clearly manifested in the ever-broadening vocal range of Daniel. Taking a cue from Dylan's Bringing it All Back Home, Brother is to Son opens confidently and intensely while slowly turning in on itself by its second half, on which Smith brings a vulnerability unmatched on his previous five albums. Oh so humbly does he pose questions of the most personal sort, begging of the listener an openness of spirit.On "Hammers Sitting Still", we find one of the most interesting Danielson songs to date, with lyrics that focus on his "other" job as a carpenter and contains some fantastic Robert Fripp-like crystalline guitar formations by Soul-Junk's Glen Galaxy and shared vocals with wife Elin, who acts as the guardian angel to the doubtful Daniel, re-assuring him that it's alright to sing about such supposed personal trivialities as the compromise one makes for the daily wage war:"I just lost my finger, and I've dropped my hammer down. I pour out on this poor ladder, and my work boots can't be found. I feel held back and frustrated, insecure and I'm annoyed. All my bubbles have been bursted, and I'm left with shoulders bruised. Work is robbing me of living, they were right on about my dreams."It's when Smith merges the personal with universal that we find him at his most magical as an artist. That's what makes the last three tunes on Brother is to Son the most inspired 12 minutes in the Danielson body of work.The title track "Brother: Son" is the perfect album closer, opening with a hush and a little drummer boy's snare going rat-a-tat-tat, and then slowly unfolding three-quarters into the song into a chorus of angels urging the downed Smith to "give it up and crawl on through" to which he, reinvigorated, repeatedly sings with the angels in the most ecstatic full-member curtain call chorus "To tell you all the truth, the son can only do what he sees his papa do," signaling the full circle has been traversed. It is a triumphant and monumental closing to the most confident and fulfilling Danielson album to date.

Release date: 06/08/04

The mark of minimalist composers Erik Satie, Steve Reich and Terry Riley have all been left on Havergal and can be traced throughout Havergal's second album Elettricita. The strength of the single note (versus the fat meaty chord) is something that Havergal has always embraced. And with unlimited tracking, the cactus needled single notes of Lungs for the Race have blossomed a bit on Elettricita, retaining that fragile sound while finding strength in numbers ? an army of individual notes so deep in number that the land they tra-verse becomes unrecognizable in their wake. The music meanders as the hypnotic rhythms build upon one another and change into slow beach breaks. In the studio, Havergal does not set out to record an event that occurs in a moment in time, but rather to create a sound collage that can only be created in his home studio. Havergal's commitment to make a modern music that is beyond his personal abilities ? relying on technology to multi-track very simple parts forty times over. Yet the music still retains a very humanistic quality, conveying moods of the most complicated sort. Yes, this highly processed music has a subtle pastoral quality to it that allows it to transcend the glitch pop soup of the day. Movietone, Califone, early Tangerine Dream and Eno's Another Green World are interesting touchstones for one looking for kindred spirits. And thank goodness for the healthy portions of piano served up on this new record. With the sublime guitar and piano interplay on songs such as album opener "Drowned Men", "The Fallen Hopeless Hope" and "Burn Up the Bay", the bliss-out potential for the lis-tener remains quite high. The tunes are timeless, immersed in an ancient static while pulsing with a futuristic beat. And through it all is the voice of a cowboy of the most contemporary sort.

An intentional homage to the world of horror literature and film, Night Mute is Ativin's ten song exploration into the themes of death, hopelessness, and fear. On it, the band has created a concise and harrowing sonic vision rooted in their trademark foundation of dirge and repetition of the guitar/guitar/drums. With emphasis placed on deconstructing the music back to its barest elements, the band has pulled away from the "spacious" and cinematic side of the Summing the Approach EP and last year's Interiors. Song titles and lyrical content reinforce the notion that this could be a subtle, disconnected soundtrack for terminally ill patients lying in wait behind closed doors. Guitarists and songwriters Dan Burton and Chris Carothers relish in the deconstruction of their own music. "Night Terror", "Drink This", "Concentrate" and "Blood" are each meticulously honed razorblade attacks nodding to a return to the Ativin of yore ? angular instrumental rockers like those on which the band waged war on earlier albums. The addition of expert, marksmen style drumming from Mark Rice (the Impossible Shapes, John Wilkes Booze) propels Burton's and Carothers' spiraling, schizophrenic guitar interplay into a nightmare space where few, if any, musical acts have gone before. Taking a look at Ativin's sordid past, one will see that there is more to their music then the late '90s post rock explosion from whence they came. In fact, Night Mute shows a stake in the divergent corners of the outsider canon. Echoes of Durutti Column, Unsane, Tones On Tail, Keiji Haino, and Organum can be heard throughout. Their sober take of the early Love & Rockets tune "The Game", for instance, finds Burton front & center at the microphone, slowly reeling in on what feels like a Philip K. Dick gothic folktale.

This is a record of lullabies for adults -- an album to lull them to a place they remember only at the quietest of moments. The guitar is a slow dance where melody and rhythm take each other by the hand. Remember the first time you heard the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter"? Pyramid Electric Co is "Gimme Shelter" slowed down to 16 RPM. Jason Molina captures the same epic struggle in tone & weight. Most of the album it's just Molina in a chair with a guitar, except on one tune he's at the piano; he is Nina Simone and he is singing his guts out. Although the Songs: Ohia front-man is all alone on this album (the first under his birth name), this is not a sparse recording. He is surrounded on all sides by ghosts and an otherworldly sonic ambience. We have producer/engineer Mike Mogis (Songs: Ohia's Ghost Tropic, Bright Eyes, The Faint, Racebannon) to thank for that, for making this a well-populated album of one. Yes, this loner is singing in a room as though no one will ever hear him, as though he's entombed for eternity. Or perhaps it's just that he was trapped in the flatlands of Nebraska for one especially lonely Winter season. On Pyramid Electric Co, Molina's low-pitched vocals resemble those of West African singer Ali Farka Toure. This whole record, in fact, seems to borrow quite a bit from African musical tradition. The guitar shuffles back and forth like a pulse. And this heart has melody as its guide. There's a timeless cadence to this song and you're not quite sure how old you are anymore. It slips every now and again, like an old goat up the hillside, but it always catches itself.

Anyone who's followed June Panic's body of work over the past decade has had the interesting opportunity to chart the path of a thinking man gone sacred. Early works were Bowie-esque pop albums made with a Homestead-like DIY aesthetic. Then came his opus Horror Vacui (2000), a blissed-out documentation of the epiphany and the ecstasy of a man in the process of surrendering to a higher power that had previously been unknown to him. Last year's Baby's Breadth was a more sober affair ? a meditation on rebirth featuring the same central character. His latest, Hope You Fail Better, continues the story of Panic's "hero". Thematically, it comes after the after-glow of Baby's Breadth. The uncharacteristic optimism and fresh perspective on life which characterized June's previous works is gone, as it's obvious June has finally stepped out from the warm indoors and realized that he lives in Grand Forks, North Dakota. To make Hope You Fail Better, June enlisted Daniel Smith as producer/guru and as his band he chose players with whom he's been playing for over a decade from his home of Grand Forks, eye of the '97 flood. Nothing was sacrificed in terms of the playfulness and freshness of production for which Smith has become well-known as primary songwriter and brain-child behind his band the Danielson Famile. On the album, June's written word is still in philosophy-speak, his melodies are still haunting, and his trademark vocals ? about which he's previously remarked that he sometimes finds himself "singing in harmony with god, while most people hear this as an off-key whine" ? have never sounded better. At this juncture, while looking at June's body of work, one could likely draw comparisons to that of mid-period Dylan (from motorbike wreck to Christian rebirth).

Having been together since their teenage years, the Impossible Shapes recorded their first hundred or so songs to four-track cassette, naturally coming into their own voice as a band and developing a hunger for a more conventional recording studio environment. For We Like It Wild, their fourth proper full-lengh, the band ventured to the wooded Indiana hills of Monroe County. Surrounded on three sides by a few thousand acres of Indiana State Forest lies Farm Fresh Studio. With Chris Barth as primary songwriter, the Shapes' fascination with "the other side" of the hum-drum routine of modern life comes to the fore. And Farm Fresh is the perfect environment for a band who would have been just as well at home on Vashti Bunyan's cart-ride across England's country-side, hoofing it during the day, setting up camp at night, chasing dogs and smoking tea into the dreamscape. During the session, this wayward band frequently lost themselves in the forest before returning to the converted barn for tracking. The end result is this incredible satellite transmission from the other side as only the Impossible Shapes know it. With alternating lead guitars, the band recalls the urban paranoia of Television and the forlorn southern gothic of Derek & the Dominoes with Barth's fey Donovan-esque voice sounding as though it's coming from across the Atlantic. All the while they maintain the urgent bounce of early R.E.M. As any Hoosier who's seen them live would attest, the Impossible Shapes are at the top of the heap of Indiana's new wave. Reared on healthy doses of the melancholy art pop of Indianapolis' Marmoset and United States Three, and - having grown up only a few short hours from Dayton, Ohio - Guided By Voices, the Breeders and Swearing at Motorists. A true ensemble band with revolving instrumental duties, the band features Barth, Aaron Deer, Jason Groth and Mark Rice and have honed themselves into quite the rhythm section over the years, pulling duty in such bands as John Wilkes Booze and Songs: Ohia, among others. The vinyl for We Like It Wild is being released by Atlanta-based label The Great Vitamin Mystery.

It's been said before, and we don't mind repeating it - Scout Niblett is the sort of visionary that is on her own artistic path. She's one of those rare individuals who is unencumbered by the paths forged by those who foraged through the wilds before her. Her new album is I Am, the much anticipated follow-up to this Nottingham, England-native's debut Sweet Heart Fever (2001). On this dynamic full-length, Scout Niblett (nÈe Emma Louise Niblett) sashays from the three-piece rock songs to solo acoustic ukulele songs to what have become - since her I Conjure Series EP and many tours in the past two years - her signature drum-and-vocal songs. It's her confident vocals and voice as a songwriter which act as the linch-pin throughout the album (as captured to tape by Steve Albini at his Electrical Audio Studio), making the transitions between these styles seamless yet giving the album the pulse of an exquisite corpse, but with one author. Bringing to mind the youthful exuberance of early Noise Addict and Daniel Johnston, and the poetic wisdom of PJ Harvey, Niblett is a true free spirit who creates her own universe in song. Late into the album resides "Drummer Boy", an epic journey which boasts the most gargantuan minimalist guitars to ever be caught to tape. Landing somewhere between Bleach-era Nirvana for its rock and Sonic Youth for its artfulness. The song ends in her shredding her voice amidst a brief calm, which is followed by calamity. Her band features Chris Saligoe (Racebannon, Rapider Than Horsepower) on second guitar and Pete Schreiner (the Panoply Academy, Songs: Ohia, Turn Pale) on drums.

With his debut full-length, Jorma Whittaker busts out of the sarcophagus known as Marmoset, the dark pop band he has fronted since 1995. Whittaker boldly opens the album with the uncompromising 7-minute long piano ballad "Clocks in the Sun". It is clear from the outset that this is Whittaker's record and no one else's. Having stripped the democratic process from record-making, Whittaker has created his best and most personal album to date ? this is his Plastic Ono Band; his All Things Must Pass. "Molly Melancholy" is something the Jesus and Mary Chain might stagger onto at the end of the line, with its snarled guitars, green clovers & blue diamonds. There is a rendition of the classic 1965 Everly Brothers B-side, "Man with Money", which Whittaker first heard as done by the Fabulous Poodles. Fans of Marmoset's peculiar sound will really enjoy the Syd-meets-the-Cure style of the apocalyptic "Birds are Falling through the Sky". Produced by long-time collaborator LonPaul Ellrich and the band included the supporting cast (but not the core band) of Marmoset's latest full-length Record In Red.

On this third album by Early Day Miners, the band set out to make what they referred to as "a rock record", one with shorter, succinctly-structured songs, to be recorded mostly live at principle songwriter Dan Burton's Grotto Home Studio in Bloomington, Indiana (in between Burton sessions engineered with Papa M, On Fillmore, Darin Gray, and Cheree Jetton of the Pilot Ships). The album does indeed take Early Day Miners one step further in the rock direction. Burton's vocals are still hushed, yet ever more confident. Song structures are more concrete ? the sprawling soundscapes of past releases foregone for a more pop feel which takes cues from Peter Gabriel's mid-80's work. Still present, however, is the ever-patient cadence with which Burton, drummer Rory Leitch, guitarist Joe Brumley, bassist Matt Lindblom and violinist Maggie Polk take on the songs. The arrangements, while sparse in comparison to past records, still feel lush as filtered through Burton's production, which shows the marks of a life-long appreciation of Daniel Lanois and classic 4AD records. Vinyl version is being released by Western Vinyl with the bonus song "Fillmore Blues" which is not on the compact disc version.

Damien Jurado is the sort of songwriter who straddles rock's past and future, and with each record contributes a new chapter to an ever-fruitful body of work. His latest offering Where Shall You Take Me? is his fifth full-length, and is a beautiful collection of ten Raymond Carver-esque vignettes terror and bliss in Middle America. Two decades after Springsteen's Nebraska, Jurado puts the darker, more complicated side of the heartland back on the map with his tales of young love (some requited; some not), innocent fun and bloodshed. Mostly acoustic with very sparse band arrangements ? with the notable exception being the old live favorite "Texas to Ohio," which sounds like a Scarecrow-era Mellencamp hit ? Jurado has the songwriting talent that turns back the hands of time and places the listener in a timeless place in which his tunes sound like they've been floating around and passed down from generation to generation, not unlike Gillian Welch, Richard Buckner or Lucinda Williams.

With the wailing lap steel of the album opener "Farewell Transmission," Jason Molina & Company usher in a new day, playing the sort of rock that your cool uncle rolled to back in the '70s. Landing somewhere on the radar sonically between Bob Dylan's Desire and Bob Seger's Beautiful Loser, though thematically in-line with Lynyrd Skynard's "Simple Man," The Magnolia Electric Co lies at the crossroads of working class rock, white soul, swamp rock and outlaw country. Boasting a doo wop-like line-up with five vocalists on the floor, featuring Jennie Benford (of Jim & Jennie & the Pinetops, who was also a key player on Didn't It Rain) and Scout Niblett alongside Jason Molina. Recorded live, in its entirety, at the hands of Steve Albini at his Electrical Audio Studio in Chicago, Illinois, with the same core back-up band that played on the Mi Sei Apparaso Come Un Fantasma Italian live album, this is the record where the Songs: Ohia fan demographics make a radical shift from the dominant bedroom universe of the world's lonely, sensitive, overqualified young white dudes, and finds refuge in the masses by being embraced by the world's truck drivers, sorority chicks, and hockey players, alike. Indeed, this is the first Songs: Ohia record with more than one song that could be played at a strip joint or monster truck show. Amid the mid-tempo slow jams, there lie some of the most upbeat material that Songs: Ohia has recorded to date.

On the follow-up to her much-lauded debut Sweet Heart Fever, Scout Niblett has pretty much wiped the slate clean. A collection of songs that are minimal in their structure and arrangement, but complex in their passion of execution, I Conjure Series is a raw and bold excursion into the poetic universe of a vagabond of the new world. Comprised of seven songs on which she performs all the instruments (four are drums & vocals songs, two are guitar and vocals songs, and one is vocals-only) this mini-album was recorded live in Glasgow, Scotland at Chem19 Studios, just a train ride from Ms. Niblett's hometown of Nottingham, England. A new drummer, Scout Niblett comes from the Half Japanese school of music-making, one which heralds the amateur's capacity for imaginative experience. The result is a record that sounds like it takes as much from Elizabeth Cotten as it does Huggy Bear. I Conjure Series is a playful record, but also a very serious one. Songs are dressed innocently, but bear heavy emotional tidings. Her second full-length is being recorded by Steve Albini in Chicago, IL and is slated for an early 2003 release.

A year has passed since Racebannon launched their last SCUD-like assault on eardrums in the form of the In the Grips of the Light album, but this has not been a silent time for the group. Locked away in the dungeon, and working in conjunction with the powers of rock n roll and the ineffable king of darkness, a new day descends upon the Bannon camp. If In the Grips was a dirty bomb, then Satan's Kickin Yr Dick In is an ICBM headed right for your rectal. Recorded once again with Mike Mogis at the helm, Racebannon craft a sordid tale of woe, depression, excitement, accolade, fear, rise, fall, alpha and omega through a five-part aural aria of the pleasures and pain of the rock n roll lifestyle. As much influenced by Sleeps Jerusalem as The Who's Tommy, this record finds Racebannon honing in on the kill, birthing songs, canonizing and edifying sonic Armageddon-day chicanery. The ratio of noise to music is now incorporated into one cohesive whole, and tracks often go from a funeral dirge to a defiant and pompous rock anthem into a spaced out  overdose on frustration and quaaludes - often within the constraints of one song. More bottom end than a Waffle House on old-folks day, enough raw power to keep California lit for a year, more presence than a class of schizophrenics, and enough heaviosity to cause His Damnededness the Dark Lord Satan himself to either mosh or foul his undies: Indiana's bastards are back, and they are poised to destroy, phasers set on kill.

Nikki Sudden's & Dave Kusworth's Jacobites first found themselves in the American spotlight in 1986, when Paul Westerberg of the Replacements turned his then label Twin/Tone onto the Jacobites' first two albums JACOBITES and ROBESPIERRE'S VELVET BASEMENT. Twin/Tone in turn expressed their enthusiasm by introducing the American masses to Sudden & Kusworth with THE RAGGED SCHOOL -- those who weren't already turned onto the ex-Swell Maps frontman's work through the British press and import shops, that is. That now classic collection of songs (taken from those first two albums as well as their debut EP) met wide fanfare in the press and among fans, but due to a lack of touring in the States and the fact that the Jacobites did not deliver a follow-up for over a decade, the band - and the albums - slipped away from the public's memory. Now, almost 20 years later, this classic collection is made available again in expanded form with 10 bonus tracks which make the Jacobites '80s collection complete (with these extra b-sides and compilation tracks, every single Jacobites song released during the decade has been made available on the Secretly Canadian reissues). Original release dates:THE RAGGED SCHOOL LP (Twin/Tone, 1986)

Release date: 08/20/02

June Panic was young when he started making babies. Baby's Breadth is already his eleventh - a bouncing baby girl! According to June, she had a longer than average gestation period, leaving him plenty of time to picture what she was going to look like once she was birthed. But babies never look like you think they will. When she was first conceived, it seemed she would be darker in temperament (moodier, say, than her older brother Horror Vacui), but instead, Baby's Breadth is a bit schizophrenic, an odd hybrid of rock, folk, lap-steel driven country and a white-boy from North Dakota's version of R&B. He is backed once again by the Indianapolis session militia that June has dubbed his Silver Sound, featuring members of Marmoset, Emperor Penguin, the Pieces, and Brando. He comes across like a gospel-period Dylan, or a Marvin Gaye/David Bowie lovechild fronting a late-60s Byrds which has been mellowed and stretched across a codeine canvas.On "The Song Is Singing Us" he sings, Well, we're drivin' the train and we don't even know what's in it. And the further we go the less we even think to look - the implications of which are boundless, coming from a fellow known for his well-documented habit of taking long strolls around town with his nose tucked in a book. A restless & inquisitive soul by nature, June takes on the role of prophetic drifter with the philosopher's stone on his back, weighing him down like an aching yet necessary paperweight in one place just long enough to make a record with some old friends.

Release date: 08/20/02

GROOVE was Sudden's last official album of the '80s (as well as his final for Creation). Recorded with his band The French Revolution, it is probably Sudden's grittiest outting. This reissue includes outtakes and his contributions to the Neil Young and Nick Drake tribute albums ("Captain Kennedy" and "Time Has Told Me", respectively), as well as the video for "Great Pharoah." Considered by many to be the dark horse favorite in Sudden's body of work, CROWN OF THORNS is the Italian-released live collection which was originally released in 1988 and was available outside of Italy in only scant quantities and at import prices. It was organized with the acoustic solo set on the A-side and the electric full band set on the B-side. The reissue, which has been expanded to include an additional 6 bonus tracks as well as a live video of "Jump On Jack", includes Sudden originals along with covers of tunes by T. Rex and the Rolling StonesOriginal release dates:GROOVE CD/LP (Creation, March 1989)CROWN OF THORNS LP (Crazy Mannequin, November 1988)

Release date: 10/20/02

Nikki Sudden and Rowland S. Howard first met while Howard was touring Europe in 1985 with his band Crime & The City Solution (along with his band mate and Sudden's late-brother Epic Soundtracks). Howard ended up playing on Sudden's third solo album "TEXAS" and they eventually recorded their dark opus KISS YOU KIDNAPPED CHARABANC together in 1987 for the Creation label. This extended reissue includes THE WEDDING HOTEL EP plus the outtake "French Revolution Blues." It also includes an incredible and never-before-released 12-song live set from September 18, 1987 from Augsburg, Germany featuring the line-up of Sudden on guitar and vocals, Howard on guitar and vocals, Desperate (of the Gun Club) on drums, and Duncan Sibbald on bass. KISS YOU KIDNAPPED CHARABANC LP (Creation, October 1987)THE WEDDING HOTEL EP (Creation, August 1987)

Release date: 08/20/02

There's new reason to rejoice now that this lost classic from '94 -- the world's first glimpse of the remarkable Smith family of New Jersey, best known as the Danielson Famile -- is being made available once again to the public. Having been described as the "most joyously eccentric group of performers to ascend the New Jersey Turnpike since Sun Ra's Arkestra" (Richard Gehr, Spin Magazine), the Famile has been slowly unfurling their mythology to the public for nearly a decade now. The group, led by eldest brother Daniel, initially had critics and audiences alike scratching their heads wondering if their collision of aesthetics and spirituality was, as some put it, "an elaborate put-on." In those days artists and rockers alike were dumbfounded by just how complicated a marriage the Famile's collision of aesthetics and faith seemed to them. In '94, there weren't many artists weened on Sonic Youth and the Pixies who were as serious about spirituality as the Danielson Famile. The independent rock underground, rather, was more comfortable leaving faith issues to be dealt with by folks such as Marvin Gaye and George Harrison. Daniel and Co., however, have helped contribute to a partial breaking down of that barrier of cool, and it all started with A PRAYER FOR EVERY HOUR, a 24-song cycle of tunes intended to be performed or experienced once an hour, on the hour, as a devotional gesture of faith.

In the year and a half since Swearing at Motorists released NUMBER SEVEN UPTOWN in 2000, the band has played over 200 shows in North America and Europe and has developed the reputation of being one of the most energetic and charismatic American bands around today, both on stage and on record. Dubbed a veritable "two-man Who" by more than one critic, this Dayton, Ohio twosome -- fronted by singer/songwriter Dave Doughman and backed by drummer Joseph Siwinski -- brings to mind Twin/Tone-era Replacements and early Elvis Costello for their ability to translate their legendarily venomous and soulful live show to record. Coming hot on the heels of the ALONG THE INCLINED PLANE EP, THIS FLAG SIGNALS GOODBYE is one of those records that will stand the test of time. Recorded by Brian McTear in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, it is vintage Motorists -- a perfect combination of compact stadium rock sing-alongs and lucid love songs that portray a character at the mercy of his own destiny. On the ol' record shelf, THIS FLAG SIGNALS GOODBYE would sit nicely next to WHISKEY BENT AND HELL BOUND, Hank Williams, Jr.'s dissertation on how the road and its many appetites can devour one's personal life. And it's Doughman's ability to make the personal so universal that makes his songs feel so right in about every context. It only takes one listen to this half-hour classic to be caught by its intensity and personality. In much the same way that contemporaries the White Stripes are proving that there's no novelty to a two-person band, the Motorists are proving that a guitar/drum duo can rock with the same immediacy as a traditional 3- to 5-piece rock band with a full rhythm section.Borne of Dayton's burgeoning independent rock scene of the early '90s, the Motorists took some initial cues from locals such as Guided By Voices and the Breeders, but over the course of an ever-expanding body of work (which includes 2 full-lengths, 2 mini-albums and several singles and EPs) have evidenced that their sound is purely Swearing at Motorists, through and through. Secretly Canadian is proud to present this next chapter in the Motorists saga, THIS FLAG SIGNALS GOODBYE.

Release date: 06/04/02

From the softest, most gentle campfire songs to the stringed wall of sound rock ensemble, LET US GARLANDS BRING glides easily without pause across a many-layered terrain like a film projected against a stucco wall just left of the steer-skull and under the Christmas lights; a feud breaks out at the family reunion, but the band plays on -- stonefaced and unaffected in the most committed way. It's the stuff of real human drama. Frontman Dan Burton delivers his songs in his slightly effected, though non-chalant, sing-song while drummer Rory Leitch (who has worked with Burton since they co-founded the band Ativin back in 1994) keeps it all grounded as the storm brews on. Fans of seminal slow-core bands such as Codeine and Low will appreciate Early Day Miners for their tempered beauty and composure, while lovers of My Bloody Valentine and mid-period Giant Sand (not to mention the Neil Young they were nodding to) will love the gorgeous distorted landscape that guitarists Burton and Joe Brumley allow to take them over.Produced by Dan Burton at his Grotto Home Studio in Bloomington, Indiana, LET US GARLANDS BRING is the perfect follow-up to Early Day Miners' 2000 debut full-length PLACER FOUND (released on Texas-based label Western Vinyl).The double-LP version of LET US GARLANDS BRING contains an extra song and is being released by Western Vinyl (distributed exclusively through Secretly Canadian Distribution as well)."Over and expanse of musical space most sadcore bands just couldn't control, Early Day Miners come on like Low, meek and striking, but with aspirations toward the epic sprawl of soundtrack music."- Joey Sweeney, Magnet

Release date: 05/07/02

In the year and a half since Swearing at Motorists released Number Seven Uptown in 2000, the band has played over 200 shows in North America and Europe and has developed the reputation of being one of the most energetic and charismatic American bands, both on stage and on record, around today. Dubbed a veritable ?wo-man Who?by more than one critic, this Dayton, Ohio twosome ?fronted by singer/songwriter Dave Doughman ?brings to mind Twin/Tone-era Replacements and early Elvis Costello for their ability to translate their legendarily venomous and soulful live show to record. This new five-song EP, Along the Inclined Plane, is the perfect segue into the band? next full-length album This Flag Signals Goodbye (out 6/4/02). Recorded by Brian McTear in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (except ?an? Help Ourselves?which was recorded by Doughman at the House of Hits, Dayton, Ohio), it is vintage Motorists ?a perfect combination of compact stadium rock vignettes with deeply intimate love songs, such as Steve Earle? ?? Still In Love With You? on which Doughman performs solo with just acoustic guitar and voice.

Release date: 04/02/02

Never has a Songs: Ohia album's process been so integral to its overall feel as is the case with DIDN'T IT RAIN, the band's sixth proper full-length. The album, like the working class South Philadelphia neighborhood in which it was birthed, has a real used goods kinda feel to it. Engineer Edan Cohen employed what some may consider "old-fashioned" recording techniques -- the entire album was recorded live with no overdubs, the full band playing in one room with the players always within arms' reach of one another; singers Jason Molina, Jennie Benford and Jim Krewson (the latter two of Jim & Jennie And The Pinetops) sharing microphones singing live together, sometimes sitting in chairs, sometimes standing. The result is a sound which resembles the warmth and personality of the classic Muscle Shoals Sound recordings of the early- to mid-70s: Willie Nelson's PHASES & STAGES, the Rolling Stones' "Wild Horses", and others by Aretha Franklin, Boz Scaggs, Bob Seger, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Wilson Pickett.

Inspired by the Mahalia Jackson song of the same name, the title track is a beautiful song about the shifting tides of life and the old cycle of "a lot of shit going down before shit clears up". It's a damn fine place to start an album that seems in no hurry whatsoever to make a universal statement, instead perfectly content to walk its own path toward resolution. And damn if Songs: Ohia principal songwriter Jason Molina hasn't gone and created a record that is even more intensely personal and healing than any of his previous works. Neil Young had his AFTER THE GOLDRUSH, this is Molina's DIDN'T IT RAIN. Indeed, this is the album with which Molina really leaves his mark as a serious songwriter and artist. On 1999's genre-bending Ghost Tropic full-length, Songs: Ohia made it clear that it could make a cohesive album that took its listener on a journey from front to back. Its dislocated feel set a haunting tone, and its largely instrumental and drone-like quality was the process of the Ohia eluding itself and its own tendencies, searching for the underside of its roots freshly yanked. With DIDN'T IT RAIN, Molina & Co. return to the beauty of the song form and offer up a startlingly soulful and introspective song cycle in which Molina -- accepting a comfortable degree of anonymity amongst the other players -- meditates on what it means to feel rooted again (in the city of Chicago, where he's called home for the past three years), sounding more sturdy at his core than ever.

So we're presented with another glorious entry in the ever-unfurling Marmoset saga. What began as a wondrous blend of bedroom atmospherics and alley-side narcolepsy has slowly brewed into one of the most exciting experiments in moody adult pop since Brian Eno divorced himself from Roxy Music, John Cale spent his melody on PARIS 1919, and Richard Davies united the globe in a lasting world-peace with TELEGRAPH. With this wonderful 8-song EP, Marmoset ought to keep its ever-increasing fandom both pleased and rabid-as-ever until its next full-length outing, the follow-up to their critically acclaimed RECORD IN RED. For the uninitiated, Marmoset is a three-piece from Indianapolis, Indiana, composed of two primary songwriters Jorma Whittaker & Dave Jablonski whose tunes evoke the same sort of claustrophobic mood that Syd Barrett and Big Star created in their respective world corners a few decades ago, but with a subtle post-punk consciousness which is the distinguisher that separates Marmoset from such idyllic peers as Belle & Sebastian and Badly Drawn Boy.

Release date: 02/12/02

Nikki Sudden & Dave Kusworth's Jacobites first found themselves in the American spotlight in 1986, when Paul Westerberg of the Replacements turned his then label Twin/Tone onto the Jacobites' first two albums JACOBITES and ROBESPIERRE'S VELVET BASEMENT. Twin/Tone in turn expressed its enthusiasm by introducing the American masses to Sudden & Kusworth with THE RAGGED SCHOOL -- those who weren't already turned onto the ex-Swell Maps frontman's work through the British press and import shops, that is. That now classic collection of songs (taken from those first two albums as well as their first EP) met wide fanfare in the press and among fans, but due to a lack of touring in the States and the fact that the Jacobites did not deliver a follow-up for over a decade, the band -- and the albums -- slipped away from the public's memory. Now, almost 20 years later, these classic albums are made available again as proper albums in expanded form as part of the Secretly Canadian Nikki Sudden reissue campaign. Aside from 20+ page booklets of photos, liner notes and complete lyrics, each of the two titles has been expanded to include bonus tracks. JACOBITES now contains the four-song SHAME FOR THE ANGELS EP in its entirety. ROBESPIERRE'S VELVET BASEMENT has been expanded to a double-disc set in order to fully represent it as the double-album as it was initially conceived and recorded, not to mention an additional 3 bonus tracks.Reissues release date: February 12, 2002.Original release dates:SHAME FOR THE ANGELS 12" EP (Pawn Hearts, July 1984)JACOBITES LP (Glass Records, March 1984)ROBESPIERRE'S VELVET BASEMENT LP (Glass Records, August 1985)

Release date: 02/12/02

With red eyes and raised fists, the rock n roll juggernaut known as Racebannon has lumbered out of Indiana and assassinated eardrums execution-style with its underpaid and underemployed audio-sonic mindfuck. These Hoosier bastard sons have birthed several illegitimate singles and split 7" recordings and left resin-stained fingertips up and down this country with their constant touring in support of said singles and their debut LP, FIRST THERE WAS THE EMPTINESS (on Level Plane Records). Over the course of their five year existence, this band of stalwarts have brought the pain and the rock to many a face, and have continued to hone in on and refine their sound, without sacrificing their requisite anger and passion (read: balls). They've become well-known for their relentless live shows at which they've destroyed nearly every PA they've had direct line to with their noisy evangelical fanaticism. The band is a cross breed of Captain Beefheart's controlled spontaneity, Melvins and Blue Cheer-esque sludgy heaviosity, and Melt Banana-like noisy spazz. And vocalist Mike Anderson is equal parts sage medicine man a la H.R. of Bad Brains as well as David Yow's mongoloid as charismatic frontman of Scratch Acid and early Jesus Lizard.

As a founding member of the much lauded '70s group, Swell Maps, Nikki Sudden, together with his brother, Epic Soundtracks, helped define a new form of musical freedom and experimentation which helped usher in the post-punk revolution. After the demise of the Swell Maps at the dawn of the '80s, Sudden enjoyed a very fertile period in which he began releasing solo albums, as well as albums with Dave Kusworth as the Jacobites, and the monumental collaboration with Rowland S. Howard (the Birthday Party, Crime & The City Solution). Drawing on the sounds of the Rolling Stones and T. Rex, Sudden made some of the most raw and inspired albums full of double-edged melancholia and twentieth century malaise this side of Neil Young & Crazy Horse and Johnny Thunders.The Secretly Canadian reissue campaign of Sudden's entire recorded output from the '80s covers ten full-length albums, which includes each of his eight proper full-lengths from that time period plus the classic THE RAGGED SCHOOL (the collection which Twin/Tone used to introduce Sudden and the Jacobites to American record buyers) and the ultra-rare Italian-pressed CROWN OF THORNS lp. Each of the ten full-lengths (some of which come packaged as a pair in a double disc set) has been fully remastered, comes with new liner notes, and has been expanded to include non-album B-sides, EPs and previously unreleased material (including the SHAME FOR THE ANGELS EP, LOST IN A SEA OF SCARVES, and WEDDING HOTEL EP, to name but a few). Also available for the first time are some of Sudden's commercial videos as enhanced cd content, and an audio recording of a 1987 live performance in Augsburg, Germany, with Rowland S. Howard.Many of the ten titles have been unavailable -- and never before on cd -- since they were initially released, and those that have seen the light of day since their initial release were so hastily put together that it may well have been better to leave them out of print (re-packaged titles were riddled with such reissue faux pas as mis-titled songs, unfortunately altered cover artwork, and missing album credits and photos). Given that none of Sudden's work from the '80s has been adequately available for the greater part of the past decade or more, plus the fact that the ten albums represented in this reissue campaign were initially released by almost as many record labels, it's no wonder that Sudden has not enjoyed as much recognition as he richly deserves based on the body of work he has put forth. It is, however, a great shame. Certainly for a decade that saw some of rock's most important voices either fall silent or grow as aesthetically barren as such icons -- and Sudden influences -- as the Rolling Stones (who opened the decade with the triumphant TATTOO YOU but then went nearly invisible, or some would argue creatively vacant, for most of the rest of the '80s) and Neil Young (who spent most of the '80s opting for style over substance, mired in his genre-exploration program), it's fascinating to note that Sudden was plowing forth with the best material of his career unbeknownst to the hungry world of rock fans who would have rabidly embraced him had Sudden not been lurking so low beneath their radar. Yes, in retrospect, Sudden's work from this period sounds so vital, and resounds with such fresh clarity in comparison to the din being created by the fallen idols of the generation which preceded him. Well it's high time that Sudden is recognized for the incredible talent that he is: a true "rock 'n roll fugitive", or, as Andy Levein wrote, an "illusive rogue treading the periphery of the rock mainstream.""Why Nikki Sudden? Why now? The almost moribund fascination with '80s musical culture is a reminder that that wasn't all about vocoders and skinny noowave ties. The aftermath of UK punk and the arrival of the demonic Margaret Thatcher turned Britain into a gray land of unemployment and social misery. Aside from Joy Division, it was the Swell Maps, Rowland S. Howard, The Jacobites, and Sudden who made the darkness audible. The foppish attitude and ambiguous sexuality of Sudden and his cohorts never sat well with Swell Maps fans. But Nikki Sudden's delicate, angry 'post-punk' pop songwriting is so perfectly flawed, it's almost painful to hear, and yet he has crafted dozens of songs between 1982 and the present, working with his brother Epic Soundtracks and many others. The long, messy hair, paisley scarves, and Oscar Wilde-ish dandyisms from the Creation years (1986 on) is what made Sudden stand out from his peers. The lyrics to gorgeous threnodies such as "Jangle Town" from Texas, which presaged more British pop bands than you've had hot dinners, are alive with a loneliness that is nearly palpable. In his hands, the guitar was an instrument that could be a circular saw one moment and a prayer wheel the next. "Death Is Hanging Over Me", which appears on both TEXAS and DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES resembles Ry Cooder or Townes Van Zandt as much as The Chameleons. Sudden's music was precocious in that it was made for a time that was yet to come." - Tim Haslett, Other Music

Release date: 10/29/01

As a founding member of the much lauded '70s group, Swell Maps, Nikki Sudden, together with his brother, Epic Soundtracks, helped define a new form of musical freedom and experimentation which helped usher in the post-punk revolution. After the demise of the Swell Maps at the dawn of the '80s, Sudden enjoyed a very fertile period in which he began releasing solo albums, as well as albums with Dave Kusworth as the Jacobites, and the monumental collaboration with Rowland S. Howard (the Birthday Party, Crime & The City Solution). Drawing on the sounds of the Rolling Stones and T. Rex, Sudden made some of the most raw and inspired albums full of double-edged melancholia and twentieth century malaise this side of Neil Young & Crazy Horse and Johnny Thunders.The Secretly Canadian reissue campaign of Sudden's entire recorded output from the '80s covers ten full-length albums, which includes each of his eight proper full-lengths from that time period plus the classic THE RAGGED SCHOOL (the collection which Twin/Tone used to introduce Sudden and the Jacobites to American record buyers) and the ultra-rare Italian-pressed CROWN OF THORNS lp. Each of the ten full-lengths (some of which come packaged as a pair in a double disc set) has been fully remastered, comes with new liner notes, and has been expanded to include non-album B-sides, EPs and previously unreleased material (including the SHAME FOR THE ANGELS EP, LOST IN A SEA OF SCARVES, and WEDDING HOTEL EP, to name but a few). Also available for the first time are some of Sudden's commercial videos as enhanced cd content, and an audio recording of a 1987 live performance in Augsburg, Germany, with Rowland S. Howard.Many of the ten titles have been unavailable -- and never before on cd -- since they were initially released, and those that have seen the light of day since their initial release were so hastily put together that it may well have been better to leave them out of print (re-packaged titles were riddled with such reissue faux pas as mis-titled songs, unfortunately altered cover artwork, and missing album credits and photos). Given that none of Sudden's work from the '80s has been adequately available for the greater part of the past decade or more, plus the fact that the ten albums represented in this reissue campaign were initially released by almost as many record labels, it's no wonder that Sudden has not enjoyed as much recognition as he richly deserves based on the body of work he has put forth. It is, however, a great shame. Certainly for a decade that saw some of rock's most important voices either fall silent or grow as aesthetically barren as such icons -- and Sudden influences -- as the Rolling Stones (who opened the decade with the triumphant TATTOO YOU but then went nearly invisible, or some would argue creatively vacant, for most of the rest of the '80s) and Neil Young (who spent most of the '80s opting for style over substance, mired in his genre-exploration program), it's fascinating to note that Sudden was plowing forth with the best material of his career unbeknownst to the hungry world of rock fans who would have rabidly embraced him had Sudden not been lurking so low beneath their radar. Yes, in retrospect, Sudden's work from this period sounds so vital, and resounds with such fresh clarity in comparison to the din being created by the fallen idols of the generation which preceded him. Well it's high time that Sudden is recognized for the incredible talent that he is: a true "rock 'n roll fugitive", or, as Andy Levein wrote, an "illusive rogue treading the periphery of the rock mainstream.""Why Nikki Sudden? Why now? The almost moribund fascination with '80s musical culture is a reminder that that wasn't all about vocoders and skinny noowave ties. The aftermath of UK punk and the arrival of the demonic Margaret Thatcher turned Britain into a gray land of unemployment and social misery. Aside from Joy Division, it was the Swell Maps, Rowland S. Howard, The Jacobites, and Sudden who made the darkness audible. The foppish attitude and ambiguous sexuality of Sudden and his cohorts never sat well with Swell Maps fans. But Nikki Sudden's delicate, angry 'post-punk' pop songwriting is so perfectly flawed, it's almost painful to hear, and yet he has crafted dozens of songs between 1982 and the present, working with his brother Epic Soundtracks and many others. The long, messy hair, paisley scarves, and Oscar Wilde-ish dandyisms from the Creation years (1986 on) is what made Sudden stand out from his peers. The lyrics to gorgeous threnodies such as "Jangle Town" from Texas, which presaged more British pop bands than you've had hot dinners, are alive with a loneliness that is nearly palpable. In his hands, the guitar was an instrument that could be a circular saw one moment and a prayer wheel the next. "Death Is Hanging Over Me", which appears on both TEXAS and DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES resembles Ry Cooder or Townes Van Zandt as much as The Chameleons. Sudden's music was precocious in that it was made for a time that was yet to come." - Tim Haslett, Other Music

Release date: 10/29/01

Marmoset's RECORD IN RED is full of apples and cherries. With this, their second full-length, Marmoset have released a near masterwork of pop pleasure. Indeed, the 13 songs on RECORD IN RED vary widely in style and sound, ranging from the Church-like acoustic stylings of "Golden Cloak" and "Torn Cup, Fly Up Above", the FAITH-era Cure tone of "Walking Thru The Lake", the moody pop melodies resembling Richard Davies' work with the Moles, the haunting confessional of "December 4th", the epic dementia of "Summertime Is Easy", to the Kim Deal inspired "Frendamine". Every song is decidedly different than the one before, but the album hangs together with a neurotic thread so fine that it's completely invisible to the gallery. One can't help but wonder how much vocalist/songwriter/bassist Jorma Whittaker's childhood as son to "Whitey" Whittaker, Rush's official tour bus driver from 1976-94, had an effect on him and his skewed perspective of pop music. Of course there's almost no resemblance between Marmoset and the Canadian champions of stadium rock, but Jorma was the first teenager ever to hear Rush's "new wave" album SIGNALS, as Geddy played him the final mix on their tour bus when Jorma was just 12 years old. While the rest of the world's twelve year olds were listening to Air Supply and Olivia Newton-John in their parents' station wagon, Jorma was in the hotel pool on Neil Peart's shoulders making a scene or flipping through 8-tracks on the tour bus. Ok, so anybody already familiar with Marmoset knows to expect something fresh & interesting. Having been compared to Syd Barrett, David Bowie, the Chills and the Go-Betweens, on RECORD IN RED Marmoset assert themselves to be among the finest purveyors of mood music for folks who like to burrow themselves in their room with a cat, a record and whatever may be lurking in their medicine cabinet. Whittaker, guitarist/vocalist/songwriter Dave Jablonski, drummer Jason Cavan & producer/guitarist Lonpaul Ellrich have created their most realized and satisfying album to date -- which they prefer to be heard "loud and alone."

The beguiling Scout Niblett of Nottingham, England, is a somebody who is worth getting to know. First off, she's going to be around for some time; she's not the sort of lass who dips a toe in the water only to opt not to take a swim. Her debut album SWEET HEART FEVER is the first fruit of the artistic partnership with the inventive drummer Kristian Goddard, and is a pretty incredible & grand unveiling of her talent for the songcraft. Bringing to mind the harrowing intensity of PJ Harvey's debut DRY, Scout Niblett's first is an album whose exterior calm is betrayed by a fantastic inner storm -- the likes of which the legions of card-carrying members of the Trans-global Network of Damaged Souls love to immerse themselves in, if only to feel a little more potent & vital for a forty-minute stretch. SWEET HEART FEVER is just such an album that will keep those souls self-medicated. Indeed, the dreamlike landscape on which the fourteen songs are presented has a meandering stream of consciousness feel to it, with conventionally structured songs underscored by a few visceral song fragments that have an unresolved yet wholly intuitive feel to them. On "Miss My Lion", for example, Scout Niblett sings,When we get home / it'll be like a party. / He's learned to move / real slowly. See how we move / sunlit and playful. / We have it all / but I miss my lion. He's already there / waiting to greet me.For someone who can rock as hard as Scout Niblett (her live show is full of Sonic Youth-like discordant freak-outs), it must be said that it came as a bit of a surprise when she went and recorded the slow, moody and menacing SWEET HEART FEVER at Chem19 Studios in Glasgow, Scotland. Sure as hell, she'll turn heads of anyone who's ever raced across a bedroom floor to flip sides of a Sandy Denny & Fairport Convention, Van Morrison, Laura Nyro or even Liz Phair record.

Release date: 09/17/01

The Panoply Academy Legionnaires -- the latest incarnation of the Panoply Academy -- presents a new full-length album, NO DEAD TIME. In the Panoply Academy's trademark fashion, stability and recklessness go hand in hand in an uncompromising lyrical & musical examination of both sides of the complicated man vs. machine coin. The tension between the two is most apparent, and with a fine balance of careful deliberation and willy nilly abandon, the 21st century man/machine symbiosis is explored carefully. What else could come from a band which harbors not only the deepest of curiosities for, but also an inherent mistrust of the codependency of the modern man and its machines. Even the lines between man and machine begin to blur, as the definition of the latter drifts off to encompass more than just the metallic human-made object, but bleeds into the fleshly arena as our sentient bodies are discovered to bear their own machine-like qualities.The recording process of NO DEAD TIME acts as a testament to the Panoply Academy's assertion that man and machine seem bound by a mutual necessity for one another. Recorded at three different locations throughout the last half of 2000, the process was equally as disjointed as the product. Original tracking began on a horse farm in Southern Indiana, with additional tracking done in a small shoebox-sized Chicago apartment, and finally the overdubbing and mixing was brought back to their hometown of Bloomington, Indiana, and completed at the home of engineer Dan Burton (of Early Day Miners and Ativin). Tied together through soundscapes, NO DEAD TIME intentionally leaves very little room for pause or reflection. And when the rare silence slips in, it only intensifies the drama that plays forth.Pinpointing the Panoply Academy sound has provided difficult recreation for many since their early days in 1996. Having been most consistently compared to the post-punk greats (Pere Ubu, Public Image Ltd., and Gang of Four) and the Washington D.C. art-rock revivalists (Nation of Ulysses, Fugazi and Smart Went Crazy), it seems to us at this juncture that due homage ought to be paid to their under-appreciated Hoosier art rock forefathers who grew up drinking the same PCB-infected Southern Indiana water and rocked the same Bloomington basements and late-afternoon public library shows that the Panoply Academy now enjoys. Bands like MX-80 Sound, Dow Jones & The Industrials, the Gizmos and Dancing Cigarettes, seem to cast ghostly shadows across their music, though how much of a conscious influence they've been on the Panoply Academy may be hard to ascertain.

From the fertile urban trench known as Glasgow, Scotland, comes a knight on horseback. He wears not the cloth of his more famous neighbors -- the Belle & Sebastians, Pastels, Arab Straps and Mogwais. No, this knight comes trotting out of camp with nary a stitch on his body. Bearded and weary, he's got the look of a convalescent after a long night of hard rain. This isn't your father's round table story. There's a new lord in town and his name is Alasdair Roberts. Most know him from the few beautiful records he's recorded with his band Appendix Out (THE RYE BEARS A POISON, DAYLIGHT SAVING and THE NIGHT IS ADVANCING). He also recently played a role on the debut International Airport full-length, as well as repeated appearances on Songs: Ohia records. On this, his debut solo album, he offers twelve traditional Scottish, English and Irish songs, unaccompanied by anything other than his voice and guitar.A word from Alasdair Roberts on THE CROOK OF MY ARM:When I began to gather together some of my favourite old songs with a view to making a record out of them, it didn't occur to me initially that most of them were love songs and ballads. I still don't know why I was, subconsciously or otherwise, drawn to such material. True, the love expressed in many of these songs is often unrequited or tragic (there are many deaths on this record), but they are love songs nonetheless: at times beautiful, at times sick, and frequently both at the same time.Moreover, it was only after the recording session that I could see how this record could be considered a "suite" of songs (although making a "concept album" in the conventional sense was not my intention at the time). With hindsight, the connections between songs became more apparent. It even seems as if the very same characters turn up again and again in different songs: is the Nancy of "Bonnie Lass Among The Heather" the same Nancy as in "Master Kilby"? Is the long-lost lover of "Standing In Yon Flow'ry Garden" the same young sailor feared drowned in "Lowlands"? The themes are age-old, the situations and characters universal, archetypal. They gain their power from the fact that we have all experienced the beauty and sickness of love; and so each listener breathes his or her own life into the phantoms which populate the songs. Similarly, the performer is charged with the task of reanimating their dark and ancient heart, and in this regard I am greatly indebted to the many fine Scottish, English and Irish singers whose interpretations of the songs inspired my own. For the most part, I have stayed fairly true to the songs as I first heard them, only occasionally modifying a tune or editing a lyric (and in the case of "As I Came In By Huntly Town", derived from the Aberdeenshire ballad "Bogie's Bonnie Belle", rewriting most of the melody). I also took the liberty of changing some geographical locations. Such tactics are, of course, likely to infuriate certain sections of the "traditional music" orthodoxy. On the other hand, underground rock music (a genre to which this record may or may not belong) places such a premium on the notion of artistic "originality" and "innovation" that many fans might dismiss the relevance of playing this supposedly long-dead music. In my own defence, I would cite Roland Barthes' point in "The Death Of The Author" that in some societies "the responsibility for a narrative is never assumed by a person but by a mediator, shaman or relator whose 'performance' -- the mastery of the narrative code -- may possibly be admired but never his genius." I would liken the subtle re- or de-formation of the songs in individual performances to the way years of footsteps gradually and imperceptibly wear down and remould a staircase.

Release date: 04/02/01

After a handful of highly praised singles, compilation appearances and a brilliant instrumental EP, Havergal comes forth with its debut full-length. An opus three years in the making, LUNGS FOR THE RACE is a true loner of a record, a desolate and static-y transmission from somewhere between our distant past and our distant future. Fusing the skewed pop sensibility of Modest Mouse, and the lo-fi electronics of Piano Magic and Arab Strap, Havergal seems propped on the crest of something new and exciting. With the four-track revolution of the 80's and 90's shimmering in the cultural rearview mirror, Havergal waves in a new era of bedroom songwriters. Yes, we are now in a digital world of zipdisc 8-tracks, 16-bit samplers and drum machines. But all is not lost and forgotten. On LUNGS FOR THE RACE the new textures and technology melds with the old standby's of thin guitars, pawn shop rhodes and the same modern daily challenges that have been on the backs of people living in the Now since the Stone Age. It's actually a comfort to know that in the everchanging tides of time, there's still so much to be uncertain about. From the heart of Texas, Havergal has appeared in our midst like a modern treatise on the state of the ageless America, negotiating the gulf between tradition and progress like a young gosling shuffling about with the grace of the great tumbleweed diaspora. The album tackles themes heavily weighed down by the American condition (disillusionment and waning dignity in a bored and monotonous landscape, unfulfilled and unrequited love in a sprawling and mostly-empty emotional basin, among other dreadful thematic afflictions). Yet we still hesitate to describe this record as a distinctly American work. Moreso, LUNGS FOR THE RACE feels like an American album made through a European lens -- a 46-minute Wenders-like portraiture. It is indeed a minimalist pop masterwork, The Last Picture Show with a drum machine beat and a cleanly-toned guitar along with the most probing of intentions. Havergal principal Ryan Murphy is not one to let the day pass slowly. Aside from all the tune-smithing, he runs the Texas-based Western Vinyl label (which released Havergal's first two singles), and spends his days as an architect.

Two sides: nocturnal & diurnal. Illustrating the duality of man, machine and establishment, the night time and the day time, the dead time and the alive time. It is in such a context that the new era in the Panoply Academy begins. A new era for a new line-up. This 7" is the debut release by the Panoply Academy Legionnaires; a precursor to their full-length NO DEAD TIME. Whereas the Glee Club leaned toward experiments in texture and timbre, and the Corps of Engineers rocked with spastic structures, the Legionnaires synthesize the two extremes into songs that stream with a disjointed flow. This is epic art rock, folks. Like the Sun City Girls reinventing "Layla" in a sleepy midwest village. Yes, the piano has been introduced and it's an unbelievable addition. Recorded at Queensize Studios on a cold day in an industrial park on the west-side of Indianapolis by LonPaul Ellrich (Marmoset, United States 3, Sardina).

At first listen to his sophomore full-length THE OX AND THE RAINBOW, it may seem that Dave Fischoff has more in common with New Zealand's finest hard-to-peg songwriters such as the brothers Peter and Graeme Jefferies (and their This Kind Of Punishment and Cakekitchen projects), Alastair Galbraith and godfather of bruised soul Pip Proud, than any of his American brethren. Perhaps it's the insular loner vibe that radiates from the songs -- the overlapped vocals, the self-sequenced drum beats and background tape accompaniment. Or maybe it's just the way his voice hits the air like hot caramel in a vat of milk. Yes, his vocal delivery is quite kiwi. But on THE OX AND THE RAINBOW, the signature New Zealander tape hiss which was ever-present on Fischoff's debut WINSTON PARK is missing along with the Xpressway air of deep alienation. No, these eight new songs are sober realist portraits which rarely delve into the first person, but rather stake a significantly distant perspective from which Fischoff observes his subjects. The result is Kafka-esque in tone, but with a clinical dose of sentimentality. The songs on THE OX AND THE RAINBOW range from the spare and frail beauty of "We Break Up and Watch the Angels Swim", "The Doctor Yawns for Columbus Day" and the gorgeous atmospheric ballad "Geranium", songs which most closely resemble Fischoff's early material; to the pomp and circumstance of "Propaganda for a Comic Strip" which is an all-out Electric Company-styled Spector-sized pop tune; and the blind-siding "Blemish and a Bowl of Oranges" which perfectly subverts his Chan Marshall-like guitar playing under a bed of sequenced pulses and bells, making a claim for most outstanding song on the album. Indeed, for anyone who has witnessed one of Fischoff's arresting live performances, this record will stand as proof that it's on albums where musical artists are really given the space to open up and create lasting pieces of art. As with contemporary album-crafters such as Neutral Milk Hotel, Jeremy Enigk and East River Pipe, Fischoff relishes the opportunity, and with THE OX AND THE RAINBOW he has offered up a truly unique record that looms somewhere just south of Where The Fuck Did That Come From.

The Danielson Famile's carnival of soul is deeply rooted in American folk and gospel music. Having been raised on their own father's gospel songwriting in Clarksboro, New Jersey, the Famile were raised with a reverence for a deeply personal and spiritual song form, one that relished not only the song itself but also the relationships which formed around that song. And the result of a few decades of the siblings absorbing such a family practice -- as well as an ample supply of post-punk, new wave, mid-80's to early-90's independent rock, and all the Dylan and Beatles along the way -- is something like if the Carter Family and the Jackson 5 were invited to collaborate for a Sun Session with Black Francis sitting in on lead vocals during a slightly overcast Sunday afternoon. It's a strange and fascinating collision of sounds and contexts, but that's what's so incredible about the Famile; their unashamed display of all things under the sun in their travelling family circus can be so many things to so many people, but all the while being the singular vision of one truly inspired mystic by the name of Daniel.Fact: the Danielson Famile is really and truly comprised of three brothers and two sisters whose actual surname is Smith, as well as three "adopted" family members."I'm gonna give you something that's already yours." And so opened their debut full-length A PRAYER FOR EVERY HOUR from 1995. It came out of nowhere and was recognized for its gall to be so original and without precedent. "Rarely has such purity and wholesomeness been so successfully combined with clarity of vision, sense of purpose, and sheer enthusiasm," reported John Fortunado of BUZZ magazine. As perfect a debut as the four-tracked 24-song opus was, it was with their second record TELL ANOTHER JOKE AT THE OL' CHOPPIN' BLOCK that Danielson Famile really established themselves as premier album-makers. Recorded partly in a funeral parlor in South Jersey by Shimmy Disc guru Kramer, the album stands as a potent and surreal testament to eldest brother and chief songwriter Daniel's revisionist take on the daily moral struggle we all wage. He does so with conviction and commitment, while still maintaining a sense of humor without falling into the trap of over-ironizing. "He worries about 'fleshly' matters, dreams of making babies, recalls his own birth and calls his mother 'Mommy,' and plays it all as a family pageant," said CMJ magazine.Their next two full-lengths, TRI DANIELSON!!! (ALPHA) and TRI-DANIELSON!!! (OMEGA) were recorded together and released separately as sister albums. An experiment in album form, they attempted to push out in three opposite directions from one source without a unification attempt. They proved that the Famile was a band who could translate the intensity of their increasingly famous live performances -- in which the band dons nurses uniforms that act, according to Daniel, as "visual reminders of the spiritual and emotional healing taking place" within audience members -- onto record. With these two records, the Famile's highly choreographed, yet still quite improvisational, songs showed a kinship with the bombastic theatricality of Queen and ABBA, the serrated and damaged edge of Captain Beefheart and early Talking Heads, the child-like perspective and uninhibited sense of adventure of Half Japanese and the Shaggs, and the deep spirituality of Washington Phillips and father Lenny Smith.Secretly Canadian is proud to announce the world-wide re-release of TELL ANOTHER JOKE AT THE OL' CHOPPIN' BLOCK, TRI DANIELSON!!! (ALPHA) and TRI-DANIELSON!!! (OMEGA).

Release date: 01/22/01

The Danielson Famile's carnival of soul is deeply rooted in American folk and gospel music. Having been raised on their own father's gospel songwriting in Clarksboro, New Jersey, the Famile were raised with a reverence for a deeply personal and spiritual song form, one that relished not only the song itself but also the relationships which formed around that song. And the result of a few decades of the siblings absorbing such a family practice -- as well as an ample supply of post-punk, new wave, mid-80's to early-90's independent rock, and all the Dylan and Beatles along the way -- is something like if the Carter Family and the Jackson 5 were invited to collaborate for a Sun Session with Black Francis sitting in on lead vocals during a slightly overcast Sunday afternoon. It's a strange and fascinating collision of sounds and contexts, but that's what's so incredible about the Famile; their unashamed display of all things under the sun in their travelling family circus can be so many things to so many people, but all the while being the singular vision of one truly inspired mystic by the name of Daniel.Fact: the Danielson Famile is really and truly comprised of three brothers and two sisters whose actual surname is Smith, as well as three "adopted" family members."I'm gonna give you something that's already yours." And so opened their debut full-length A PRAYER FOR EVERY HOUR from 1995. It came out of nowhere and was recognized for its gall to be so original and without precedent. "Rarely has such purity and wholesomeness been so successfully combined with clarity of vision, sense of purpose, and sheer enthusiasm," reported John Fortunado of BUZZ magazine. As perfect a debut as the four-tracked 24-song opus was, it was with their second record TELL ANOTHER JOKE AT THE OL' CHOPPIN' BLOCK that Danielson Famile really established themselves as premier album-makers. Recorded partly in a funeral parlor in South Jersey by Shimmy Disc guru Kramer, the album stands as a potent and surreal testament to eldest brother and chief songwriter Daniel's revisionist take on the daily moral struggle we all wage. He does so with conviction and commitment, while still maintaining a sense of humor without falling into the trap of over-ironizing. "He worries about 'fleshly' matters, dreams of making babies, recalls his own birth and calls his mother 'Mommy,' and plays it all as a family pageant," said CMJ magazine.Their next two full-lengths, TRI DANIELSON!!! (ALPHA) and TRI-DANIELSON!!! (OMEGA) were recorded together and released separately as sister albums. An experiment in album form, they attempted to push out in three opposite directions from one source without a unification attempt. They proved that the Famile was a band who could translate the intensity of their increasingly famous live performances -- in which the band dons nurses uniforms that act, according to Daniel, as "visual reminders of the spiritual and emotional healing taking place" within audience members -- onto record. With these two records, the Famile's highly choreographed, yet still quite improvisational, songs showed a kinship with the bombastic theatricality of Queen and ABBA, the serrated and damaged edge of Captain Beefheart and early Talking Heads, the child-like perspective and uninhibited sense of adventure of Half Japanese and the Shaggs, and the deep spirituality of Washington Phillips and father Lenny Smith.Secretly Canadian is proud to announce the world-wide re-release of TELL ANOTHER JOKE AT THE OL' CHOPPIN' BLOCK, TRI DANIELSON!!! (ALPHA) and TRI-DANIELSON!!! (OMEGA).

Release date: 01/22/01

The sound movement on GHOST TROPIC will seem sudden to some; without warning. To others, it'll seem a very logical step in a very foreign direction. On its fifth proper full-length, Songs: Ohia has stepped outside the box and has delivered its most subtle record of fantastic depth to date. Indeed this is the most cohesive and "album-like" Songs: Ohia has ever been. The eight songs on the record sprawl out into one another, telling one long sonic tale, allowing very little room for chapter breaks or piss stops. In this regard, Lou Reed's moody classic BERLIN comes to mind as a worthy fore-bearer. But it's the strange ethnic flavor in which GHOST TROPIC is steeped that makes it stand apart from its predecessors, albums which were all received as crossing guards for the Great American lost highway. Surely this album will leave those expecting such fare scratching their heads. Blending the electro-acoustic minimalism of the David Bowie and Brian Eno Trilogy with the percussive worldliness of Tom Waits' SWORDFISHTROMBONES, the group seems to hop the globe from a British Isles folk rock influence to an Ennio Morricone-like Spaghetti Western feel to the faintest echoes of the Chinese Classical ringing like a death murmur in the distance. And the songs, they build in a slow, unconscious manner, pulsing with an intensity, but never betraying their most simple core with too much instrumentation or calculated progression. Yea! GHOST TROPIC is the first album which reveals Songs: Ohia's own Tropicalia Blues in full bloom.

But what has brought Songs: Ohia to this critical juncture? Perhaps it is purely circumstance -- that four men were brought together to play as bedfellows for a week on the great plains of Nebraska. Acted out and recorded at the Dead Space Recording Studio in the state's capital of Lincoln, GHOST TROPIC was performed by principle Songs: Ohia songwriter, singer and guitarist Jason Molina; Appendix Out principle and Ohia alumnus (having played on THE LIONESS) Alasdair Roberts of Glasgow, Scotland; Lullaby For The Working Class drummer and new Ohia recruit Shane Aspegren; and engineer Mike Mogis of Lullaby For The Working Class and Bright Eyes.

It was 1987. Loren MazzaCane Connors, not yet recognized by a world audience, had already recorded and released his 8 volume Dagget series and his five albums with folk singer Kath Bloom. He had abandoned his guitar for a 3-year period, and returned to it with renewed vigor. He was not yet recognized as one of the great musical loners of the age (his future Black Label solo recordings and the eventual unearthing of the Dagget series were the titles that would establish Loren as such). He was, in fact, performing live and about to record some of the most potent recordings of his career -- recordings which may challenge any present notion of Loren being a true loner at all. It was on these recordings that he first played with his future wife Suzanne Langille. Together they performed Langille-adapted traditionals and gospel standards, slowing them "down to a crawl." Two albums were released on his own St. Joan label under the moniker Guitar Roberts with Suzanne Langille, entitled BLUESMASTER 1 and BLUESMASTER 2, in 1987 and 1988, respectively (both issued in small runs of 200). This album represents the best of their material as a duo from those two records (there were also intermittant solo guitar compositions on both BLUESMASTER recordings), plus the one song they performed as a duo from Loren's 1989 IN PITTSBURGH full-length ("Haunted House") and three previously unreleased recordings from the same period. In her spare and "deeply considered" arrangements for these songs, Suzanne allows all the room necessary for their collective personality to shine through, making for truly timeless performances. These recordings were Suzanne's first to be released publicly. They showed a singer who was unafraid to push herself to lay claim to these folk tunes and make them her own, particularizing them with her own experience and thus imbuing them with a rare vitality. These recordings layed the groundwork for the work they would later do on the albums COME NIGHT, THE ENCHANTED FOREST, LET THE DARKNESS FALL and with their new group Haunted House. After even a casual listen to the songs on this collection, it's quite difficult to imagine either Suzanne or Loren playing with another performer, or alone for that matter. The grace and intimacy with which they perform these songs together gives the impression that they'd been playing together since childhood. It's no wonder Loren found so much fulfillment in playing music again.

Tuckered is the feeling you have after meeting CONCENTUS. The Panoply Academy's third proper release is, of course, a progression, though unexpectedly mutated like some genetically engineered seeds. All of the shambled sounds and floating ideas of the previous releases have sprung forth, their ambiguity still at the forefront, yet perhaps they've become less anxious to assert it. Performing under a new suffix, the Panoply Academy is no longer afraid to play rock music or look at the audience or even act like musicians. Panoply singer Darin Glenn squeaks and hocks part-nonsensical lyrics on each song. Guitarist Marty Sprowles scratches the strings into hummable starting points before the other two bat back-and-forth. The rhythmic structures of drummer Ryan Hicks and bassist Pete Schreiner and are not pretty; their locomotive lurches forth and derails without advanced notice. Odd time changes abound on CONCENTUS, every song is fractured into slivers. At any given time, there is part CHAIRS MISSING here or a stutter-stop of a US Maple there and the lyrical callback of Gang of Four. And within the cracked everyday electronics are impacted deep, subliminal glitches. But remember, this is still rock music, modern music. The album is composed of nine songs, grouped into threes, each group making up its own suite. In their live show, the songs all collide together, making the individual songs almost indistinguishable to the unknowing ear, creating something of a carnival. "50%", in and of itself, is its own mini-suite, with a true pop song up front, a yodel/trumpet duet in the middle and the last minute sounding like the first minute of "Teenage Wasteland." "Cash in Your Coffin" begins with a guitar tone-poem and snaps into something, some agitated, spastic refrain or rumba that the kids will eat up, and then it's gone. "Nar Nar Nar" and "The Entertainers" are the singles. CONCENTUS was recorded with Jim Kuczkowski at the Engine Room and Marmoset's LonPaul Ellrich at his house, in the dowry, both located inside Indianapolis, Indiana.

Opening with an epic and ending with a little spartan ode, THE LIONESS is songwriter Jason Molina's fourth and most dynamic and empassioned full-length album to date. Recorded at Chem19 Studio in Glasgow, Scotland, with his Glaswegian friends Aidan Moffat and David Gow of Arab Strap, and Alasdair Roberts of Appendix Out, as well as with Songs: Ohia veterans Geof Comings and Jonathan Cargill, it is, on its exterior, a much darker affair than each of its predecessors. Perhaps it was the Scottish weather and company which gave it such a feel, for at the core of THE LIONESS, there is a warmth and tenderness unmatched by previous Songs: Ohia recordings. Indeed, this is a dark and sultry record, but not a melancholy one. While the last Songs: Ohia album AXXESS & ACE was an album which revealed many of the painful truths about love through its loss, this is an album about the beauty of love as seen from its rich foundational and experiential stages.

Developing from their roots in the Midwest American lo-fi scene -- a movement championed by Dayton's elder statesmen Guided By Voices -- MORE SONGS FROM THE MELLOW STRUGGLE reveals a band waking from the hazy murk of a lo-fi past ready to share their own very personal epiphany. Swearing At Motorists shares as much musically with Buffalo Springfield and MUSWELL HILLBILLY-era Kinks as with later curators of the bad vibes such as Richard Hell and Alex Chilton. But there is also that early 80's new wave canon that seems to have deeply affected Doughman in his song structuring, attitude and vocal delivery. Indeed you can hear remnants of Joe Jackson, the Cars, and what was once perhaps a vicious Elvis Costello fixation. But this album is anything but retro. Rather it is a very contemporary look at disillusionment in the modern auto age, about lacking something so integral that there is nothing left to do but drive. Yes, this is a heavy record. Not even the insane hooks and anthemic choruses can hide that this is a record about coping with the loss and abandonment of something very near and dear to you.

Let the Darkness Fall is the return of singer / lyricist Suzanne Langille. She is once again joined by longtime collaborator Loren MazzaCane Connors as well as Atlanta's Andrew Burnes and David Daniell of the group San Agustin. The result is an intensely bleak, yet satisfying, musical excursion. A much steamier affair than Suzanne's and Loren's previous concept album THE ENCHANTED FOREST, LET THE DARKNESS FALL showcases Suzanne's lyrical intonation and her zesty, more sensual vocal style. Her deep and throaty vocals parallel the doleful sounds of the trio on songs like "Strong And Foolish Heart" and "A Sadness In Me." The album is full of gently churning and ethereal moments which are steeped heavily in the musical and emotional concentration that only the wisdom afforded to veterans of this group's tenure can allow. Loren's lone blue notes quietly escape to the forefront of the dual guitar weaving of Andrew and David. Six of the seven songs are darkly textured by the bending tones of what is often a three-guitar chorus. LET THE DARKNESS FALL finds Suzanne and Loren entering their fourth decade of performance, while Andrew and David are beginning their second. But does it offer a clear picture of where these artists are headed? Perhaps. Or maybe it's simply a month of frolic in the life of four fine musicians.

Ativin have received a lot of shit for supposedly sounding like Slint. That's the truth. If you read all the reviews they have garnered, you may read the word "slinstrumental" more than once. But all that adds up to is lazy post-college scribes who just want to hawk freebies for those Dexter's Cigar reissues. Far from slintstrumental, Summing The Approach is more plain mental. More P?rt and Gorecki than McMahan and Walford, the four songs clock in a smudge under 30 minutes and expand further out than their debut full-length from last year, German Water. Indeed more like a spilled bong, it stretches out into a blurry haze. But it's not stoner rock. Sure it has its spacy elements, but the Ativin guys are far too straight-laced to bear such a distinction. On Summing The Approach's four songs, guitarists Dan Burton and Chris Carothers sway their guitar drone back and forth over Rory Letich's drumming. The groove heard on German Water and their "Modern Gang Reader" 7" is still there, just submerged. Just like most of their Indiana friends who will crank up "Cy" as they burnout in vacant parking lots with shit weed. The trio recorded these songs back in March of 1998 with Steve Albini before slumming their way state to state on an exhausting tour. And the rumors about a split 7" with Roadside Monument are false. Stop calling about it.

At times disturbing and uncomfortable, Marmoset present their tales of street walking, dope seeking and titty clubs in precise and pop-formatted doses. On their debut EP HIDDENFORBIDDEN critics painted Marmoset, despite the under-two-minute-mark in which their songs traveled, as a brooding and slightly twisted group borrowing from early Sonic Youth. Still, Marmoset's delightful pop sensibility is undercut by a dark underbelly that keeps the songs hanging in a complex zone of romance and reality, sharing more a vibe stylistically similar to Felt, Syd Barrett and early Roxy Music, while mixing the over-the top pomp production of SOME GIRLS-era Rolling Stones with feet planted firmly in the ALIEN LANES living room. Undoubtedly, with TODAY IT'S YOU, Marmoset finds itself on the cusp of a very dirty sleeve.

Songs: Ohia is Jason Molina. On Axxess & Ace he is assisted by Geof Comings (Party Girls), Michael Krassner (the Lofty Pillars, Boxhead Ensemble, Edith Frost Band), Joe Ferguson (Pinetop Seven), Dave Pavkovic (Boxhead Ensemble), Julie Liu (Rex) and Edith Frost. It was recorded by Krassner at his Truckstop Studios in Chicago. What resulted was the most full-sounding Songs: Ohia record to date. Liu's aching violin playing with Molina's desperate vocals transport the songs to great depths.

"There is no bullshit on this record. It's a love song record, so I wrote as directly to the point as I could. There is nothing snarling or cynical anywhere on the record. It is not invented stuff either. It's a desperate record, it's a jealous record, it's an imperfect record. It is also as incomplete as a man. This record wasn't made to rid me of any doubts or to heal me. The end result should show a man, anxious to learn, anxious to share, anxious to curtail all that is selfish. A note about the record as physical fact: it was done almost entirely live and first take. None of us were paid and the musicians all heard these songs for the first time on the day we made the record. Needless to say we could never have predicted the range and the urgency of this record's atmosphere. We are all very proud of this new Songs: Ohia record Axxess & Ace."

After over a decade of appearances on Loren MazzaCane's albums, Suzanne Langille releases a full length of her own songs. THE ENCHANTED FOREST combines Suzanne's celestial voice and lyrical talent with Loren's crystalline guitar work. Loosely based on John Lebar's 1945 film of the same name, Suzanne acts out the story of a lost child, a forest's impending end and those that try and save it, through the voices of six characters. As on previous MazzaCane albums, Suzanne's soulful and blues-filled moans create burning holes in the hearts and ears of many during each song. Loren's guitar stays at a constant whisper pitch throughout the album, his minimal chords and lone notes have never been this fragile. Intertwined with Suzanne's character expressions, the guitar mixes with the muted sounds of chirping birds and the feeling of THE ENCHANTED FOREST takes hold. Reminiscent of the St. Joan-era collaborations between Suzanne and Loren, these two have never sounded so brilliant.

During recent years Dave Fischoff has explored various musical forms, retaining some and abandoning others. Besides the early bands he tried his hand at, the musical life of Mr. Fischoff has been in the solo realm. Coaxed on by friends and former bands mates Dave began to perform solo in the summer of 1994 in the Bloomington, Indiana area. Using only a guitar and Marshall stack Dave found himself jumping around basements and clubs. Feeling there was an integral element missing in his music, he began to employ pre-recorded sounds into his live show. With the new combination of tape letters, found sound, translucent electronics, guitar and voice, the music took on a new life. Dave used his lyrical imagery and story telling ability to enhance the deeply personal music. In November 1997 Dave recorded WINSTON PARK with friend and engineer Thom Hoff (American Analog Set). The album was recorded in Dave's living room over two weeks using a 1/4" Tascam 8-track and one Shure microphone.

In the keeping with the spirit of Indiana's punk past, the Panoply Academy Glee Club surpass expectations in music and performance. The unaware may scratch their heads and wonder what in Indiana could instigate this musical experimentation. One need only to look at the past to understand the Academy has been infested with the same spirit that flamed Hoosier forefathers MX-80 Sound, Dancing Cigarettes and the Gizmos. Originating in Bloomington during the spring of 1996, the Panoply Academy is composed of Nick Quagliara (bass and vocals), Ryan Hicks (drums) Bekkah Walker (samples, keyboards and vocals), Marty Sprowles (guitar and vocals) and Darin Glenn (vocals, guitar and trombone). Its members hailing from a long line of vital Indiana rock bands including Intro to Airlift, Pretty Pony, Guiseppe, Sway Kiss, Yellow Based Red, and the Yarnmarvins, the Panoply Academy know where it's been and have their sights set on where they want to go. In addition to the nine songs recorded with Mike Krassner at Truckstop in Chicago, RAH! contains twelve pieces of interwoven sound pastiches recorded by various means, individually and collaboratively among the band. Released in July, 1998.

An album dedicated to a tradition & routine so common to our everyday lives yet so rarely captured to tape. Featuring some of the most distinctive voices in music today, all without instrumental accompaniment. Featuring Appendix Out, Richard Buckner & PW Long (duet), Danielson Famile, Drunk, Dave Fischoff, the Grifters, David Grubbs, Jandek, the Japonize Elephants, Jarboe, Damien Jurado, Suzanne Langille, Nikki McClure, Modest Mouse, the Panoply Academy Die-Cast Cadets, Pedro the Lion, Elliot Sharp, Songs: Ohia, Swearing At Motorists and Mia Doi Todd, as well as the voices behind God Is My Co-Pilot, Low, Red House Painters and Two Dollar Guitar.

The fabled second Songs: Ohia full-length, originally released in 1998 on cd by Happy Go Lucky and lp by Secretly Canadian, will enjoy a re-release by Secretly Canadian this August. The new version of the cd will have expanded artwork and will be widely available around the globe. Still available on LP as well.

Lorain, Ohio; it's a tough place to grow up. You either escape or you don't. Given the industry that exists (or existed) there - the steel mill, Ford plant, and shipyard - the mix of people is like none other. One thing is for sure though, it's blue collar through and through. What's this have to do with a new release from Songs: Ohia? Well, Jason - main Songs man, like myself, grew up in this god-forsaken hole of a city and as much as you can leave the city, it never leaves you.IMPALA offers further testament to the songwriting talents of Jason Molina. The 13 tracks contained herein offer a glimpse into the soul of a man burdened with trying to exorcise the demons of life, loss, and subsistence. This isn't something one can fake. It comes from growing up with the knowledge that the factories your parents worked in are not an option for you and that your only real option is to try and get out (easier said than done).

Paired down to only Jason and Geof Comings for this release, the tracks on IMPALA are simultaneously the sparsest and most textured yet to be released by the band. Consider this to be the most honest and strongest release yet from Songs: Ohia. Our suggestion; Head to the local Knight's of Columbus, grab a seat at the bar, order a Genesee, and drink away your pay check to this one. That's what they're doing in Lorain.

After the world-wide success of BOB'S BACON BARN, the Elephants honed their bowing arms and picking fingers to deliver their second call to sea, LE FETE DU CLOUNE-PIRATE. The Elephants have successfully stapled together the fringe of bluegrass and jazz with Middle-Eastern melody and late night absurdity. At times it seems if the living spirit of jazz legend Moondog has gotten a leg up on the Elephants as two alto-saxophones carry out each jam. Still sticking to the bluegrass framework, the banjo, upright bass and guitar carry the heavy riffs of twang as the fiddle and flute intertwine into thick strands of fusion. Rollicking and kicking up dust the junk percussion set up keeps time as the chimes, vibes and glockenspiel add the accents and country tingles.

Brother Mick Turner and Brother Jim White have walked from the Timar Sea to the Indian Ocean drudging their instruments through the bush. These two Melbourne, Australia natives have made a name for themselves as 2/3 of the Dirty Three and by our estimates it won't be long til they're known widely as the brothers Tren. This debut single places the familiar guitar and worn harmonica of Turner with the taught and rebounding drums of White. The sounds within were hinted at on Turner's solo album, though at 33 rpm these instrumental ball breakers are given time to flesh out and expand over the Kata Tjuta. At a sum of fourteen minutes a means is provided for the Tren Brothers to stand apart from the D3 apparatus long enough to warrant notice as individual and flourishing musicians.

The masters of the rock miniature are back. Less than a year after their debut full-length, the critically acclaimed MORE SONGS FROM THE MELLOW STRUGGLE, the duo known as Swearing At Motorists have another album for the public to parade behind. We know it hasn't been long, but sometimes life's cycles run oblong and you find yourself with less things to kick the dog about than usual. Perhaps it was that '99 was such a fallow year record-wise for the Motorists, perhaps releasing no records in the last year of the '90s put a little pressure on Dave Doughman and Don Thrasher to return to their frenzied form (aside from MORE SONGS, 2000 has seen the release of two 7"es and a handful of compilation appearances). Or perhaps songwriter Doughman had a whole lotta lousy times to inspire him to write what are easily the best songs of his career. It's the sorta thing that makes a label salivate and gleefully quake, when an artist goes through relationship troubles. Indeed, the gambling men among you will call NUMBER SEVEN UPTOWN a sour relationship album. Yes, the carcass of the relationship that spans this record is weathered, worn, and -- by the last song -- pretty much rotted. And Doughman's emotional ambivalence on what appears to be his life crumbling before his eyes is what makes this album so sweet for all the twisted souls out there -- us included -- who love to watch another man have a lousy time. Better him than us, right? Cut from the same blue cloth as the late great Hank Williams, and landing somewhere between Richard Hell's DESTINY STREET, Neil Young's ZUMA and The Breeders' THE POD, NUMBER SEVEN UPTOWN finds Swearing At Motorists at their finest hour. Drummer Thrasher, a veteran of Guided By Voices, the New Creatures and the Hope Fools, provides the perfect steady beat that echoes hallmark drummers like Charlie Watts, Moe Tucker and Hal Blaine. Singer/guitarist Doughman, known for prowling the stage during live shows like a spastic mix of Prince and Jon Spencer, proves to be a man of all seasons, having also produced the album.

Albino deer have crept from thick blankets of bayou fog, dusty country roads bear witness to crawling men resembling tattered garbage bags, Civil War remnants pick fragile banjos for the dancing campfire dead... This I have seen yet not one of these glorious sights equals the power of Songs: Ohia... Another offering shall calm the howl from an angry cold winters' night. To a shattered slab of stone on the unforgiving coast of Canada. Thanks.

String the banjo. Lick the reeds. Pack the bowl... The lives of the Japonize Elephants are the type an outsider can never comprehend. Brought together by an unnatural obsession with pirate culture, robots, Bill Monroe and fried bacon, the nine people of the tribe are steered by the Emperqq of Zorlock through a catacomb of musical styles at hyper speeds only a Zorlockian could function at. BOB'S BACON BARN is the first release by the Japonize Elephants and gives a glimpse of what this band is capable of. Their musical goulash smells of bluegrass sauteed with a Spanish Middle-Eastern spice and smattered with hardcore Irish pepper, yet is not so easy to pin down. Recorded live to one microphone on Thanksgiving Day, 1996, the violin sounds as crisp as the hubcap percussion.

A reissue of June's epic seventh solo album. Originally released as a cassette on June's 3 OUT OF 4 RECORDS in December 1995, it shows a more raw side to Grand Forks, North Dakota-native June Panic than his previous solo albums or his earlier work with Free Jesse.

I first met Arthur Russell when I was 19. I had just graduated and all my friends had gone to London or Paris. I was left alone with exactly 126 euros and I knew I had to go somewhere. The only thing I could find for that money was a bus trip to the Mosel Valley in Germany. Unfortunately it turned out to be a wine-testing trip for old people. I was highly disappointed at first, I had expected some kind of adventure, but after a while I just started walking around in the hills with my walkman. A friend had made a tape with songs from Arthur Russell's "Another Thought" and so that week the most beautiful voice I'd ever heard accompanied the most beautiful landscapes I'd ever seen. I burned my neck really bad.

Four years later I was playing shows here and there and I often played Arthur's "A Little Lost" on my kalimba. I had suggested to my friend Victoria Bergsman that maybe we should make a cover single or EP of Arthur's songs. She put me in touch with Verity Susman from Electrelane and I brought in Joel Gibb from the Hidden Cameras. At this point we felt there was a certain symmetry between us, we could've brought in a few more and made a tribute album but tribute albums are boring in my opinion and tend to lose focus halfway through.

Verity was the first to contribute with the music and her version of "Our Last Night Together" which almost made me cry when I heard it. The song, a quite obscure demo from the World Of Echo sessions, had passed me by unnoticed but Verity made it clearer and brighter. She plays piano like a 5 year old kid with the fingers of Erik Satie. It's playful and almost wild, ending with a whirlwind, but when she sings everything stands still.

Victoria had a bit of the opposite approach. She chose a more upbeat song, "Make 1,2," and turned it into a jazzy, hazy song. A sleepy clarinet walks by her side like an old dog. This was around the time her solo project Taken By Trees was just forming and the song became a starting point for her.

For me, the choice of song was never a question as I'd been playing "A Little Lost" on and off for three years. I managed to make my kalimba sound like drops of water and just recorded it in a few hours at home.

Joel however had more problems handing in his song, and in the end I decided to bring him over to Gothenburg and simply put him in a studio. I had heard him singing "That's Us / Wild Combination" a year before and knew it would be magic. We brought in El Perro Del Mar to sing the Jennifer Warnes parts. I was playing piano.

-- Jens Lekman

Two custom made Moleskin booklets.

'Kortedala Tee' from Jens' full length 'Night Falls Over Kortedala' printed on 100% cotton Alternative Apparel shirts.

'Kortedala Tee' from Jens' full length 'Night Falls Over Kortedala' printed on 100% cotton American Apparel shirts.