Scott Morrow 
Cloudeater: Sun and Sidearm reissue (9/11/12)
“This Place”
First released last September, Cloudeater’s Sun and Sidearm was a moody, melodic debut LP that blended rock, pop, and electronics to spacy and sexy results. The highly textured seven-song release called upon many timbres, but it leaned on worming bass lines and cooing vocals to set the tone.
Converge: All We Love We Leave Behind (Epitaph, 10/9/12)
Did you catch this last week? That’s right — it’s the first track and video from Converge’s All We Love We Leave Behind, a brand-new dose of hardcore pyrotechnics due out in a scant five weeks.
Syncing with the blazing tempo, director Max Moore’s cinematography offers ultra-low-attention-span cuts with a dark, blue-grey palette. Try to count the many quick tie-ins to vocalist Jacob Bannon’s cover art.
Remember when “indie rock” bands used to play…*ahem*…rock music? If you’re under the age of 20, you might not — but either way, get acquainted with the recently reactivated Casket Lottery.
Living here in Chicago, we’re not ready to give up summer until we’re good and ready. So even though the electronically inclined North Coast Music Festival purports to be “summer’s last stand” from August 31 to September 2, we’ll be living it up until the autumnal equinox.
Semantics aside, if you’re here with us, you can enjoy North Coast too, seeing artists such as Pretty Lights, Atmosphere, Big Boi, Girl Talk, The Rapture, Dan Deacon, YACHT, Rebirth Brass Band, People Under the Stairs, and many more in addition to some of dance music’s biggest names. See the full lineup here.
Despite a global outcry and support from high-profile musicians such as Paul McCartney, Madonna, and Sting, three members of Russian punk collective Pussy Riot were sentenced today to two years in jail for storming a Moscow church altar and performing an anti-Putin protest song.
The video for High on Fire’s “Fertile Green,” amazing in its ridiculousness, is a mini-masterpiece of psychedelic sci-fi. Follow “Balteazeen, the Christ Twin” in his quest to reach some sort of Goddess of the Sticky-Icky.
Minnesota rapper/producer and punk-hardcore musician P.O.S returns this October with the follow-up to his acclaimed crossover album Never Better, and the Doomtree co-founder likens the electronically infused album to an “anarchist dance party.”