Music

Portland natives Blitzen Trapper have always enjoyed blurring the lines between their own unique experimentation and what their traditionalist contemporaries might consider musical schizophrenia. With Wild Mountain Nation, their self-released follow-up to their 2004 release Field Rexx, these grizzlies takes their mish mash of mountain-man bluegrass, country, and outer-space electronics to a new, messy level of weird.

After receiving praise for their debut album Australasia and the epic The Fire in Our Throats Will Beckon the Thaw, Pelican‘s third full-length release, City of Echoes (Hydra Head), finds the instrumental quartet once again blending atmospheric rock with a touch of doom.

Definitive Jux CEO and genre-expanding hip hop mastermind El-Producto, better known as El-P, will be featured as the live performer on Late Night with Conan O’Brien this evening.

After a week-long tour in Italy, Big Business kickoff the U.S. leg of their summer tour tonight with a show at Seattle’s El Corazon.

Hundreds of submissions have been narrowed down to just ten bands, including Kidnapkin (shown above), for Sabian’s ‘Dream Spot’ contest, a chance to tour with the 2007 Vans Warped Tour and play on the ‘Kevin Says’ stage, which is notable for being the springboard for bands such as Fall Out Boy, All-American Rejects, and My Chemical Romance.

The Evens, comprised of Ian MacKaye (Fugazi, Minor Threat) and Amy Farina (The Warmers), have announced tour dates for eastern Canada and the northeastern United States. The shows will begin promptly each night at 8:30 pm.

Coming as a boon to all fans of underground media, grassroots film distributor B-Side has acquired the documentary Pirate Radio USA, which is reviewed in ALARM’s summer issue, for distribution.

A plaintive banjo plucks more emotively with each repetition—each line a sad story or fond memory that bears retelling. Punctuations of glockenspiel ping here and there and a voice enters, timid and tired. Though your ears say “Americana,” the origin is Malmö, Sweden.

Sub Pop’s newest buzz band, Pissed Jeans, sounds like the kind of guys that will get fucked up with you on a Monday night while your “responsible” friends are already getting their beauty sleep to prep for the next morning.

To promote his two-CD set, Definitive Collection, Afro-beat musician Femi Kuti has announced he will tour the United States this summer.

A Sleepytime Gorilla Museum show is as tightly rehearsed as a Broadway musical and as volatile and fearsome as a circus act built around feral grizzlies.