Music

Sufjan Stevens, driven by his love of America, has announced that he will make a music/film piece about one of the least loved American landmarks — the Brooklyn Queens Expressway.

In addition to joining the throng of musicians and labels with YouTube channels, Relapse Records will release new albums from The Dillinger Escape Plan (pictured above), High on Fire, and Coliseum in the late summer and early fall.

Bay-area avant rockers Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, whose theatrical mixture of melodies, progressive rock, and metal gives them few contemporaries, have returned with a third full-length studio album. The album, In Glorious Times (The End), leaves no shortage of material on par with the group’s past efforts.

On September 14th and 15th, many indie darlings will be playing at the geographically formed Red Rocks Amphitheater in Colorado. The initial line-up, announced by Monolith today, includes CAKE, The Flaming Lips, The Decemberists, Spoon, Kings of Leon, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Ghostland Observatory, and many others.

2005’s Set Yourself on Fire was critically acclaimed, so, keeping in line with recent trends, Stars decided to create a remix album. Instead of remixing their own tunes, Stars went to their Arts and Crafts labelmates to create the songs for this record. (Hence the title.)

At worst, Shapes and Sizes come off like the self-consciously quirky “free spirits” who mock your cynicism and discredit your legitimate depression, trying to get you to join sing-alongs and play charades at parties where you’d rather just be left to drink beer and converse. So why is Split Lips, Winning Hips, a Shiner so irresistible?

“Helpless Corpses Enactment,” the group’s song given visual accompaniment, will be available on In Glorious Times on May 29.

Tom Waits (shown left), Philip Glass, Kronos Quartet, and more performed on the Dalai Lama’s U.S. tour in 2003 and will now have moments of the evening captured on compact disc.

More suspension than solution, Rainbow, a collaborative effort between drone/blues/metal pioneers Boris and psych-rock veteran Michio Kurihara (Ghost, White Heaven, the Stars), strikes a rare balance. I can’t be sure, but this sounds like a concept album; with flowing in cinematic passages, each melody invokes character and drama.

Ben + Vesper, husband-and-wife duo of the same names, are new members to Daniel Smith’s Sounds Familyre family. Accordingly, their latest album, All This Could Kill You, is a challenging, creative expression featuring lyrical non-sequiturs, experimental melodic diversions aplenty, and labelmate Sufjan Stevens on banjo, piano, and assorted woodwinds.

In presenting their first full-length release, quirky rhythm mashers Battles have done their unique, cavorting style a great disservice.