Year: 2008

Singer-songwriter Jolie Holland‘s fourth record, The Living and the Dead, will hit stores and online October 7th. The album features an array of guest producers and collaborators, producing a sound in par with her signature moodiness, but with the unique creativity born out of a studio environment.

In celebration of their 25th anniversary, Camper Van Beethoven will release a long-overdue greatest hits collection on CD and in digital format entitled Popular Songs. The album will feature 18 of the group’s most beloved songs, spanning from their 1985 debut Telephone Free Landslide Victory to their 1989 release Key Lime Pie, and including “Club Med Sucks,” “Border Ska,” and “Circles.”

Montreal’s Plants and Animals will kick off their West Coast tour, after recently completing their East Coast tour this past May, today with a live session on Seattle’s KEXP at 12:00PM PST/3:00PM EST. The group will continue to tour in support of their album, Parc Avenue, throughout the summer with dates in Europe in June and Canada in July. Another U.S. national tour is scheduled for this fall.

Imaad Wasif With Two Part Beast and RTX have launched a joint tour together last week. The two acts kicked off their chain of shows last Thursday in California and will take their show on the road through to the beginning of July.

Sigur Rós have released the dates to an extensive world tour. The “hopelandic” quartet from Iceland look to bring their cosmic sound across the world for the duration of the summer and into the fall. From June to October, the band will be making stops in North America and Europe, while also stopping in Japan to play a handful of shows.

Out of Brattleboro, Vermont and Amherst, Massachusetts comes Witch. The four-piece, consisting of legendary Dinosaur Jr. guitarist J. Mascis on drums, bassist Dave Sweetapple, and guitarists Asa Irons and Kyle Thomas, was born out of a mutual desire to bring rock’n’roll back to their hometown, which had become known for it’s flourishing freak folk scene (including Thomas and Irons’ band Feathers). 2006’s self-titled debut on Tee Pee Records was so full of memorable tunes and heavy psychedelic riffs that as a whole, listening was a self-indulgent experience, the rock equivalent to premium ice-cream.

For anyone who still dreams of hopping in a jalopy and cruising the back roads of the American South, Jim White‘s Transnormal Skiperoo will make excellent road music. 

While most of us sit here idling our MacBooks and laptops, let us take a moment to reminisce about a time where computers were housed in separate buildings and took nearly a week to program a simple math calculation. In celebration of the 60th anniversary of “Baby,” a forerunner to all modern computers, the University of Manchester has unveiled the first computer-generated music recordings ever: a scratchy version of “Baa Baa Black Sheep” and a truncated version of “In the Mood.”

In 2008, Vancouver-based indie-rock quartet Ladyhawk will unleash a veritable media assault on the public. In March, the group released its sophomore album Shots to widespread acclaim. Plans for extensive touring in both the United States and their native Canada are in the works. With a little luck, the band may even find themselves on tour in Europe this summer. Best of all, Let Me Be Fictional, a film documenting the recording of Shots, is making its way around film festivals.