Peter Lanceley is a guest contributor who manages his own blog, This Music Wins , which you can visit to discover much more new music. click image to view artist in itunes Sounds like: Aphex Twin, Battles, Squarepusher, Four Tet What's so good? Not only is Three Trapped Tigers a successful book by Cuban writer Guillermo [...]
BEST ALBUMS OF THE NOUGHTIES The daunting task of putting together something that you know lots of readers won't agree with is never easy, but then we thought you could always go make your own lists. At least we had the balls... So the 50s had rock n roll, the 60s had it's pop and folk, the 70s it's punk, disco and glam, the 80s it's pop, hip hop and hair rock, the 90s it's grunge, brit pop and dance music. It begs the question - what standout genre defines the [...]

The Fiery Furnaces have a new album called Take Me Round Again that was released digitally only on November 5th. In theory, Take Me Round Again is a collection of cover, but it is also a collection of alternate takes of previously released songs. In other words, it features the members of the Fiery Furnaces re-writing each other's work. As Eleanor (who accounts for 1/2 of the Fiery Furnaces) put it: "I've gotten into the habit of rewriting songs Matt has written, just as a way of practicing and singing at home. Originally, I had [...]

By Jon Stone | @jwstone Over the weekend I saw three shows in Champaign-Urbana. Each show was a good show-great even. But wow, were they different experiences. This disparateness is one of the things that makes thinking and writing about music appealing: parsing through the musical experience looking for clues and connections of their quality with our resulting affinity. My goal here is to review each of these shows but also make a larger argument (that includes some theorizing-sorry: academic alert) about why it is we like the music we do and what [...]
We're getting to that point in the year where new music releases pretty much slow down to a crawl, which is why I'm pretty excited that December will be upon us soon and I can spend that entire month talking about all the great stuff that has been released in the previous 11 months of the year. So as the new music gets sparser, I'm going to throw a couple random songs at you over the next couple weeks just to either keep you up on some great stuff I've enjoyed recently or just to gave some sort of content [...]

by BBG Dark Castle at Lit Lounge ( more here ) Reminder, TONIGHT (11/17) marks the return of psyche-doomers Dark Castle (not to be confused with the old school Macintosh video game ) with the post-hardcore-gaze of The Atlas Moth , noise-math-tech-kitchen sink metal of Wetnurse , and the abstract hardcore of Tiger Flowers . First band [...]

La scorsa settimana abbiamo terminato il nostro viaggio attraverso gli album più importanti del decennio che si sta concludendo. Abbiamo quindi pensato di riassumere il tutto in questo post che non è altro che la lista completa, tappa per tappa, degli album che di volta in volta abbiamo approfondito, in modo tale da avere una sorta di indice delle varie puntate. Dopo il salto trovate anche la listona di tutti gli album che di anno in anno sono stati inseriti fra "gli album da salvare". [...]

Drums Play Spaceland Monday Night (and It's Free) Ray Davies put on a fantastic show on Saturday night at the Orpheum. If you get a chance to see him on this tour do not hesitate. More on that later. Another great week this week. If you're into buzz bands you might want to check out Drums tonight, The Big Pink on Wednesday, Tape Deck Mountain on Thursday, Neon Indian on Friday and The XX on Saturday. Some of those will be good, but I'm recommending a variety of [...]
The 5th annual Toronto Sketch Comedy Festival has come and gone. There is something about entering a dark theatre with a bucket of beer in your hand that tells you that you are in the right place for the evening. The thing I love about the sketch festival is its accessibility to the audience and the fans who turn out. When you pay your ticket and wait for the show to start, you are surrounded by performers, their parents and other fans of comedy. Everybody around you is on the same [...]
Welcome to the new, not-really-improved BabyStew This Week In Chicago listing. What's new about it, you ask? Absolutely nothing, except that it now covers the week from Monday through Sunday rather than Sunday through Saturday. It always seemed weird to me not to be listing Sunday shows until the morning of – when not many people are reading blogs – for the sole purpose of sticking with the conventional definition of "week" ( i.e. , Sun-Sat). But convention be damned. So here's what's going on in Chicago this "week". [...]
Math-metal kingpins the Dillinger Escape Plan have announced details of their upcoming fourth full-length, and first under the Season Of Mist umbrella. The album, titled Option Paralysis, will be issued on the band's own Party Smasher label via Seaso...

Prior to coming to Brooklyn and starting up The Hold Steady , frontman Craig Finn and lead guitarist Tad Kubler were in a band together called Lifter Puller . What's interesting about LP is that you can definitely hear, in both sound and lyric, the beginnings of what become THS lurking in that noisy punk sound. (And have Craig Finn and Tad Kubler aged at all in the last 20 years? They look exactly the same. Kudos to good genetics I guess.) LP broke up in 2000 and as of 2006, all [...]

Couple days ago I talked about 8-Bit the band and 8-bit the genre, and I feel I could have gone on for quite a damn while about the genre . I mean, there's a lot to say about it, a lot to like. You've got that nostalgic feel, for one, and to make it sound good at all you need tons of layers, so that aesthetic property is built right in. Plus the old electronic beeps just have such a bright, clean tone to them. You can't not smile when you hear it. Unless it's bad. Then [...]

Royal Bangs - Let it Beep Release Date: September 15, 2009 Label: Audio Eagle 8.9 HANK ALTOGETHER: I got drunk and played Royal Bangs drum at a show once. Yeah. I admit it. It was me. But in my defense, there was no way that I wasn't going to be a part of the insane bacchanal noise coming out of the [...]

NOTE: Settle in my friends..... We got a doozy for you today! Photography by Butch Gerald Happy Friday my friends! Friday the 13th to boot -- Ooooo! We are very, very excited and lucky to have a very special presentation for you today, something of a rare bird 'round here on TSURURADIO! That's right, if you read the header, today we are very proud to present our interview with the [...]
Math rock pioneer Tim Kinsella and his longstanding outfit, Joan of Arc, have just announced a new album, but it's not what you think. Don't Mind Control isn't a proper Joan of Arc record; it's a compilation of 18 brand new songs from 18 bands and musicians the monstrously prolific Kinsella has worked with throughout his career. Don't Mind Control expands on the premise of 2005's Association of Utopian Hologram Swallowers , a five-band split EP featuring Kinsella affiliates. Noticeably absent from Control is the band that started it all, scrappy emo godfathers, [...]

MP3: Lifter Pulller - "To Live and Die in LBI (Live)" On December 1, Lifter Puller will be reissuing their catalog in digital format. While Craig Finn and Tad Kubler would later go on to form The Hold Steady, Lifter Puller is one of those influential bands that made their mark on the indie world like few others. In addition to the reissues of their self titled debut, Half Dead And Dynamite , The Entertainment And Arts EP and Fiestas & Fiascos , the band will also be releasing a [...]
The title might be wordy, but it truly says it all. On December 1st, The Orchard will digitally reissue the entire catalog of Lifter Puller , the Minneapolis outfit that featured now Hold Steady members Craig Finn and Tad Kubler. As the story goes, Lifter Puller formed in 1994 and would release three full-length efforts and an EP before calling it quits in 2000. And while The Hold Steady were formed shortly thereafter, the band's discography would go on to earn a cult following, which would be realized by a sold-out three-night reunion [...]
Recently reunited and always under the radar, midwest hardcore heroes Coalesce returned to form this summer with the release of Ox . It was the first album in ten years for the Kansas City act, but picked up naturally where their late '90s masterpiece 0:12 A Revolution in Just Listening left off. A seamless thesis on the state of underground brutality, Ox added a dose of Americana to Coalesce's already deconstructed belligerent hardcore, heady metal and unrepentant math. Bands traditionally drop attached EP's before the [...]

One of my favorite things about being plugged into the blogosphere is being clued in to the relatively new phenomenon of an artist going from obscurity to hype in the blink of an eye. One mention in the right spot and suddenly a band is blowing up. One blog features a tune, which gets picked up by three other blogs. Those three turn into nine, which turns into twenty-seven, which is about the limit of my math. Long story short, catching the right ears can go a long way. When I first [...]