Song of the Week

Slowdive's self-titled record sparkles.  The British shoegaze stalwarts sound fresh and inspired even after a 22-year hiatus.  The music's dreamy and dissonant textures rival anything from the band's 90's alt-rock heyday.  The song's are gorgeous and transportive, impeccably detailed and produced, showcasing a startling range in mood that usually flutters somewhere between Rachel Goswell's evocative register and Neil Halstead's ringing guitar.  Check out opening track "Slomo," "Star Roving," "Sugar for the Pill," and every other giftworthy song.

Song of the Week

Fleet Foxes new album (six long years!) comes in June.  Enjoy "Third of May / Odaigahara" when you get a chance.  New song, well-worn vibes.  "Aren't we made to be crowded together, like leaves?"

Song of the Week

Julie Byrne's lush folk album is a natural beauty.  Amid stunning production values, Not Even Happiness showcases Byrne's expert arrangements, fluid fingerpicking, and gorgeous alto, as she moves through tales that incorporate the land and her traveling spirit, at once earthy and ethereal.  Enjoy a live rendition of "Natural Blue," one of the album's many gems among the rolling fields of her subtle visions.

Song of the Week

Our favorite Swedish pop troubadour is back with his first album in five years.  Life Will See You Now is jam packed with Jens Lekman's bittersweet brand of literate whimsy.  Guitars, pianos, horns, and strings will set listeners aloft in melancholy bliss, in what is perhaps his sunniest effort to date.

The opening track, "To Know Your Mission," recounts 16-year-old Jens' conversation with a Mormon missionary in 1997.  It is arguably the finest pop song ever written about Mormonism, treating it with a spirit of generosity, and deftly using a young missionary's higher purpose as a springboard to the artist's sincere dreams.  "But in a world full of mouths / I want to be an ear / If there's a purpose to all this / then that's why God put me here."  Amen, Jens.  An obvious, amen.

Song of the Week

Jamie xx crystallizes neon on The xx's third record, encasing the trio's nocturnal sound with a vibrant new glow.  After his stellar In Colour, it almost seemed a foregone conclusion that the band's palette would include a wider array of his EDM, UK garage, and rave flourishes.  But make no mistake:  I See You still shimmers under the romantic, give-and-take spells of Oliver Sim and Romy Madley Croft; it is now just cast in technicolor.  Check out the excellent dance track "I Dare You."

A Moon Shaped Pool

Radiohead dropped their ninth studio album today.  A Moon Shaped Pool.  Just two full headphone listens in, it is an instant classic and worthy of the band's nearly unparalleled canon.  My first listen came while walking my dog, the low-hanging clouds of a wet-soaked Mother's Day holding in the smell of wet grass in my lungs.  Perfect weather to accompany the record.  I had that giddy moment where just at the midpoint of my first listen, I understood that I was hearing a masterpiece.  It is one of the most exciting feelings any music nerd can have during a first listen: self-aware reckoning of a classic before the music has even stopped playing.

Radiohead's symphonic record is an easy shorthand.  Jonny Greenwood's cinematic arrangements (with gorgeous strings provided by the London Contemporary Orchestra) cut through many of the tracks in arresting ways.  Other early instrumental impressions: the striking piano/keyboard runs, the ridiculous guitar solo (a Radiohead guitar solo!) on "Identikit," and the slithery baselines that undergird many tracks.  The band has created something massive sounding and deeply intimate in one fell swoop.

Spectral, cavernous, and beautiful, the record may be the most Radiohead-ey thing they have ever released.  It sounds like what I hear in my head when I think of the band.  Perhaps it is the fact that many of the songs have been in gestation for so long, including long-time fan favorite "True Love Waits," which serves the role of crushing closer.  That is not to say the album does not feel fresh or in-the-moment, especially with many exciting instrumental episodes like the savage strings on opener "Burn the Witch" or the soft-hewn keys on "Daydreaming."  It just feels strangely familiar in all the best of ways.

The band deconstructed the titanic rock record - their own! - on Kid A and then, after furious political agitation on Hail to the Thief, arced through interpersonal drama on In Rainbows.  The King of Limbs followed, which felt more like a collection of disparate sonic experiments pulling the band in myriad directions: skittering electronica, haunting acoustic rock, and downtempo dirges to name just a few.  A Moon Shaped Pool seems to move beyond any useful narrative.  Out past the paranoia or the politics, it settles into the thick of thick things, weighing and considering life's mysteries, resisting at times the nagging sense of dread with something approaching resolve.  But how long can the center hold?

And the video below?  Sheesh.

Song of the Week

Radiohead released its first single in 5 years today.  "Burn the Witch" is accompanied by a Wicker Man-inspired video, underscoring the track's unsettling lyrical content and pulsating string section. "Stay in the shadows / cheer at the gallows," Yorke sings.  "Abandon all reason / avoid all eye contact."  The video and the song are already being psycho-analyzed by legions, which demonstrates that people are stoked for the group's new album and this mesmerizing piece of art is ready-made to be decoded.

Song of the Week

Hope Sandoval is back with a Record Store Day single, "Isn't It True," from the forthcoming album of her sometimes band The Warm Inventions.  A superb song that taps into her evocative trademark: longing, hazy dream pop.  After a 17-year hiatus, her recent album with Mazzy Star was a welcome return, and this is clearly more of the some, with no intention of fading away soon.

Song of the Week

In September, Kurt Vile will release his sixth solo album, b'lieve i'm goin down ....  The guitar maestro, hair dangling in his face, cannot be bothered with anything but vibes and grooves.  Check out his new video for "Pretty Pimpin," which perfectly captures his ethos: down home, blissed-out introspection.

Song of the Week

The D Man has a bunch of summer vibes to catch up on.  But the new Destroyer song/video from the forthcoming Poison Season must be addressed first.  "Girl in a Sling" is a world weary, post-suburban sigh.  A sort of "Send in the Clowns," center stage soliloquy for the streetwise bard.  Few writers and vocalists can pull something off like this, and Dan Bejar was made for this type of lovelorn breakdown.

The video's director had this to say about the clip:

Bejar sings a lot about cities and girls and injury, sometimes all at the same time. Sometimes they are the same thing, as surreal novelists would have us believe. Besides, people like to see Dan sing—which he doesn't do a lot of in this video, but he does do a little bit. We wanted to make a video that dealt with central Destroyer themes: to some, Destroyer is a lech; to some, he is an arsonist; to some, he is a savior. To me, he is the consummate comedian, but he resists that role. So we decided to go the opposite way and make something sad, something tragic, something that fits the new record. The adage “comedy equals tragedy plus time” is attributed to Carol Burnett's mum. Or it might have been Steve Allen. Either way, I always want Dan to do physical comedy, but he resists. He's a natural, though. He's the Pacific Northwest's Buster Keaton, and I hope one day to share that with the world. One day. For now, though, there's just this sadness. This poison season.

Song of the Week

Destroyer aka Dan Bejar is back with his first album since 2011's desert-island disc, Kaputt.  Check out "Dream Lover," the first sneak peak from Destroyer's tenth full-length Poison Season.  That is the album art above, to which The D Man can only say, yeeeeeessssssss!

Song of the Week

Mew.  Denizens of Danish dream-prog.  Back with their first album in six years.  The past two records have been year-end Top Ten material.  Stoked to hear where it all goes next.  + - (yes, that is the album's name) drops this week.  Check out the videos for "Satellites" and "Water Slides."

Song of the Week

Modest Mouse released its first album in seven years.  Strangers to Ourselves is a polished take on Isaac Brock's singular songsmithing; the musicianship is self-assured and strong, but the record still teeters on the edge of abandonment, frenetic and uncertain.  The complicated rhythms and interlocking guitar grooves are some of the highlights of the record, as demonstrated by "The Ground Walks, with Time in a Box."

Song of the Week

George Lewis, Jr. aka Twin Shadow is set to release album number three: Eclipse.  The swooning new wave revivalist, a guitar-wielding cross between Prince and Morrissey, seems to be swinging for the arenas with his new tracks "To the Top" and "Turn Me Up," and the same goes for the recently-dropped, big-pop send-off "I'm Ready."

Song of the Week

Sufjan Stevens is a national and personal treasure, one of the most important songwriters of the 21st Century, and one of the few artists who can thread the needle of genuine Christian poetry and music.  His forthcoming album, Carrie & Lowell, is inspired by his mother and stepfather, which he candidly describes in this recent interview.  Check out "No Shade in the Shadow of the Cross," a powerful meditation in the wake of his mother's passing.

Song of the Week

The D Man is back after a well-deserved hiatus.  Cultivating the Top Twenty list is no joke.  Lower Dens have a new album, Escape from Evil, that is dropping soon and the track "To Die in L.A." is worth checking out; I heard it on the radio and was instantly drawn in.

Song of the Week

Desertshore's second all-instrumental album, Migrations of Glass, is another beautiful collection of songs from the Bay Area.  Featuring Red House Painters/Sun Kil Moon guitarist Phil Carney and classical pianist Chris Connolly, the tracks stretch out, unhurried, with lovely little surprises in texture. Their last album, Mark Kozelek and Desertshore, was chock-filled with their expert playing, but it was always going to be overshadowed by Kozelek's inspired lyrical presence.  Here, Carney and Connolly express their languid musical ideas without the heft or expectations from their longtime collaborator.

Check out "Until Morning Comes" and "Forevermore" right here.

Song of the Week

Spoon just dropped a new album called They Want My Soul, the band's first full-length since 2010's Transference.  Check out the bouncy groove of first single "Inside Out."  The D Man is listening and liking.  A lot.

Song of the Week

In a summer devoid of great jams, it is nice to know that JT can still spin gold.  Sounding more like the summer of 1994, "Not A Bad Thing" could have cozied right up next to SWV, TLC, and Boyz II Men.  Check out a live performance on Fallon.  Feeling left out by not catching his current 20/20 Experience Tour.

Song of the Week

Dan Snaith is a chilled-out electro wizard of sorts.  The D Man still loves the lo-fi homemade stuff like "Jacknuggeted" when he still went by Manitoba.  Since then, under the moniker of Caribou, Snaith has taken his productions to ultra-deluxe places.  Digging this new groove from the forthcoming Our Love.