Lincoln Eddy 
Grizzly Bear: Shields (Warp, 9/18/12)
Brooklyn-based indie rockers Grizzly Bear produced a killer album last year in Shields, a sweeping combination of the electric and acoustic that cements them as one of the genre’s elite. Now they’ve produced a disturbing but beautiful video for “Gun-Shy,” one of the album’s standouts. Evoking elementary-school science videos as well as body horror, the band’s use of animated GIFs might just win it some sort of newfangled Internet award.
Converge: All We Love We Leave Behind (Epitaph, 10/9/12)
Vocalist Jacob Bannon, frontman of Converge, balances a career of music, fine art, and business. His raw vocals belie a depth, beyond the bleeding paint and canvas of tattoos, explored in the short documentary “Rungs in a Ladder.”
A twelve-minute meditation on life, meaning, and intention, “Rungs in a Ladder” is an eloquent creative manifesto — the musings of someone fighting insecurity, staying active, and dealing with being out in the open when he really just wanted to “be a bass player or a drummer…to be completely anonymous.”
Check out “Rungs in a Ladder,” directed by Ian McFarland.
Soundgarden: King Animal (Universal, 11/13/12)
Soundgarden’s King Animal, its first album in 16 years, is both a welcome return to form and an exercise in creative experimentation. Now the band has teamed with renaissance man Dave Grohl in a video for heavy rocker “By Crooked Steps.” And with Dave behind the lens, the serious tone of the music doesn’t mean that you can’t have a little bit of lighthearted fun.
Filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen have always used music effectively in their films, with 2000’s Oh Brother, Where Are Thou? arguably responsible for a resurgence of interest in bluegrass. It’s unsurprising then, that for their next film, Inside Llewyn Davis, they’ve chosen to chronicle the life of fictional singer-songwriter, Llewyn Davis, loosely based on Dave Van Ronk.