It was a perfect storm. That’s how OK Go bassist Tim Nordwind explains the explosion of the band’s video for “Here it Goes Again.” You know the one — where the band members perform a hilarious, amazingly synchronized dance on treadmills.

Galactic’s latest album is a tribute to home. The group — a band that’s moved from funk to R&B to rap and back again — searched for inspiration in the neighborhoods of New Orleans, its adopted home base, tapping into new trends like bounce music, a hybrid of rap spiced with punk sensibilities. By capturing the Crescent City’s changing scene in Ya-Ka-May, Galactic has written a history of New Orleans music.

Chris Urbanowicz is bored with his own music. And when you’re stuck playing the same songs night after night, that becomes a bit of a problem. For the Editors guitarist, that meant something had to change when recording their third full-length, In This Light and On This Evening.

Singer/songwriter Daphne Willis may be the luckiest girl in the world. She’s on the eve of releasing her debut record, mounting a tour to support it and handling all the writers who suddenly want to know all about her, all because of a simple twist of fate.

Halloween’s better than half a year away, but Timi Conley is ready. To be fair, he’s always ready to jump at an opportunity to dress up.

“I’ve always loved dressing up, ever since I was a kid,” laughs the man whose live shows are known for wild costumes as the basis of his stage presence, fittingly wearing a pair of self-proclaimed “nerd glasses” he brought along for the occasion of his conversation with Blur. “I’ve got a deep closet worth of stuff, man.”

To the extent that the indie rock aesthetic has generally been defined by standing in opposition to the music that dominates Top 40 radio, the last ten years have provided numerous challenges to that integrity vs. the commerciality dynamic. First, Justin Timberlake turned up on stage with the Flaming Lips and on hipster “best of” lists. Then, Kelly Clarkson’s “Since You’ve Been Gone” became the favorite cover song of indie bands, just as everyone from of Montreal to Grizzly Bear mentioned Beyonce as an inspiration. By the end of the first decade of the 2000s, indie rockers were all over the pop charts and pop music was all over indie rocker’s iPods. With Odd Blood, Yeasayer set out to prove that even 80s pop deserves a second act.

If you’re a long-time fan, you saw this coming a mile away. However, if you’ve been away for a bit, there’s a surprise in store. That’s because the up-tempo aggression found on Aloha’s new release Home Acres seems light years from the initial soft shell of balladry the band emerged from on 2000’s That’s Your Fire. The organic metamorphosis makes sense for those up close, but it’s a different story on the outside, even as recently as one album ago.

Teen Dream. The phrase evokes images of Tiger Beat magazine covers and John Hughes-style teenage romance. But for Baltimore duo Beach House, it represents something far less concrete.

“I think ‘Teen Dream,’ for us, is just really symbolic of that unbridled obsession and passion and that feeling of really, really loving things and giving yourself to things wholeheartedly, that you get as a teen, and then occasionally when you’re older,” Alex Scally, the guitar and keyboards half of Beach House, says of the duo’s choice of title for its third album. “The title is more like an invitation to be intoxicated in this feeling.”

Cooking Up The Good Stuff

Delicious Chamber Pop From the Kitchen to Your Ears
by Natalie B. David
The scent of baked apples can sure inspire more than just a rumble in your belly. At least it can if you’re Clare Manchon. The Berklee College of Music-educated chanteuse, and namesake of chamber pop group Clare and the Reasons, often found herself penning tunes for her band’s sophomore effort, Arrow, while cooking away in the Brooklyn, N.Y. apartment she shares with husband, and main Reason, Olivier. 
“It’s unconventional, and I think when I’m writing I …

Proving that there’s nothing quite so interesting as interpersonal drama, the breakup record has become its own kind of concept album, providing an emotionally rich vein of material that has been mined on albums stretching from Bob Dylan’s bitter Blood on the Tracks to the tangled melodrama of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours and Jarvis Cocker’s recent midlife crisis on Further Complications. Always a restless spirit while the leader of Pedro the Lion, using his album-long narratives to explore a cast of unsavory and conflicted characters, David Bazan hasn’t made the normal break-up album. With Curse Your Branches, his first solo album, the former icon of Christian indie rock has done the unexpected. He has broken up with God.