Music

Percussive guitar slinger Kaki King is set to release her forth album, the follow-up to Until We Felt Red (2006), in March. The album, entitled Dreaming Of Revenge, will be released on March 4, 2008 through Velour Music Group.

Independent record label Young God Records has signed acoustic folk-bluegrass band Fire On Fire, some members of which were previously incarnated as noisy art-punk project Cerberus Shoal. The five-piece group makes its debut with a five-song EP only available online or on tour.

Recreating the music of the 1980s is a risky venture, as it is easy to be considered a novelty. Disco Romance, however, emulates the underground Italo disco sound that its Swedish songwriter/producer Johan Agebjörn appreciated as a kid in the 1980s.

If the stylish, slickly produced goth-metal style of musician-producer Waldemar Sorychta is your cup of tea, you’ll probably enjoy Faith, the debut album of the producer’s new project Eyes of Eden.

To hell with hyperbole! It isn’t a stretch to cite gifted genre amalgamators Estradasphere as a model of near perfection in both technical proficiency and compositional excellence.

Inspiration can come from the strangest of places. Last Friday at Chicago’s Abbey Pub, Mission of Burma’s inspiration came from one faulty microphone stand. The post-punk giants, comprising bassist Clint Conley, drummer Peter Prescott, and guitarist Roger Miller, took the stage that night, launching into Miller’s “1001 Pleasant Dreams” from The Obliterati (2006).

Pride is a modern folk marvel. Each song on Phosphorescent’s third album is given a baptism in reverb, lending an eerie glow to eight beautiful, sparse tracks.

Copeland singer/songwriter Aaron Marsh has come off as the King of Nice in the indie pop world for the past seven years, and now he and his bandmates are offering a collection of their sappiest B-sides as an aural valentine to their love-struck listeners.

Autumn of the Seraphs is the second release from Pinback in a series of seasonal album titles, following 2004’s Summer in Abaddon. Whether or not the next record will include winter or spring in its title is up in the air, but multi-instrumentalist Zach Smith seemed to think it would be “kind of dumb to stop now.”

Whenever life falls apart, solace can be found in blasting The Mountain Goats’ The Sunset Tree on repeat. There’s a lyric in “Broom People” that goes: “I write down good reasons to freeze to death in my spiral-ring notebook.” It’s heartbreaking.

By the End of Tonight are from Alvin, Texas, and distill the progressive elements of their dark, instrumental metal into a churning, complex mass of sinister cacophony. For Complex Full of Phantoms, the group shares disc space with Roseville, California’s Tera Melos, who provide six songs of spastic absurdity.