Formed in Syracuse, NY, Ra Ra Riot are Upstate’s native sons of indie rock. They recently played a stellar show at Mohawk Place, touring behind songs off their new album, Beta Love. The record is currently streaming in full and sample tracks at the groups website, and upon first listen it seems that the band has stayed in line with their signature upbeat, pop style. Beta Love is out 1/22 via Barsuk.
Parquet Courts are a four-piece punk band from Texas that relocated to NYC and well, wanted to record a record, so they did and released it last August on Dull Tools. Right. So why are they releasing it again via What’s Your Rupture? on January 15, you say? Well, mostly because every major music source fell asleep on the excellent punk record last year, so...yeah. The awkwardness will fizzle out once you listen to "Stoned and Starving" below:
As I mentioned back in November when they released their debut EP Clusterchord, Sufjan Stevens collaborator DM Stith and John-Mark Lapham of The Earlies have teamed up to form a great new band called The Revival Hour and they will be dropping their debut record Scorpio Little Devil on 1/21. While its being called a pop record in theory, The Revival Hour’s debut is more of a fusion of 60s soul, doo-wop, and folk as Stith lends his hallucinatory vocal melodies and loops while Lapham offers a layered stew of instrumentation and catchy rhythms. Listen to “Hold Back” below:
Indie rock juggernauts Yo La Tengo will go ahead and release their thirteenth album of their nearly 30 year career on 1/15 via Matador. The album is called Fade and was produced by John McEntire (The Sea and Cake) instead of Roger Montenout, who has produced every album since 1993’s Matador debut, Painful. In an interview from 2009 Kaplan had this to say about the band’s relentless creativity: “You may think that you know everything that we do...we’ve thought of a few new things over the past couple of years.” Listen to the excellent new single off the new album in “Ohm” below:
Foxygen are another great new act that’s were signed by the folks at Jagjaguwar by way of handing their demo to producer Richard Swift after a show one night in NYC. Luckily, he got them in the studio for their debut album last year because they will already be releasing their follow-up We Are 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace and Magic on 1/22. They’ve cleverly been described as “the raw, de-Wes Andersonization of The Rolling Stones, Kinks, Velvets, Bowie, etc. that a whole mess of young people desperately need.” I probably can’t top that. Check out the Richard Swift directed video for “Shuggie” below:
After releasing the excellent sophomore record, Days, and hitting the road for almost a year as a part of his main gig playing lead guitar for Real Estate, Matthew Mondanile has been hard at work this summer on his third album under his drowsy, lo-fi moniker Ducktails. The Flower Lane is out 1/29, and while the recently released title track retains the groggy vibe that we’re familiar with from his prior two LPs, there is an undeniably stronger production quality to the track, as Mondanile has expanded his bedroom studio into a basement practice space, adding four band members. The Flower Lane is being released on Domino Records.
When Girls broke up back in July I was pretty saddened by the news. In three years, they had put out three incredible releases, and seemed to be only getting better and more prolific; the SF duo of Christopher Owens and JR White had created something that became one of my favorite bands of the last five years. Since the split, it was hard to know how quickly either would get back into making music, or if they would at all. White got back into producing pretty fast, and a few months later Owens announced the exciting (and speedy) news of a forthcoming solo record and shared a new track called “Here We Go.” The track takes on a similar soft rock guise, but a lot of the punk and gospel stylings of work as Girls are absent, and instead we’re left with an anchored, folkier song that still bleeds out every drop of emotion we’re used to experiencing with Owens. Listen to “Here We Go” below:
Three years ago a charming five-piece LA band calling themselves Local Natives released a killer debut album called Gorilla Manner that they recorded in their SoCal house, and then toured the shit out of it. Since they’ve garnered comparisons to big names like Grizzly Bear and Arcade Fire, there’s been a hum as to where they wound go next. In a way it’s not surprising that their first single off the forthcoming record, “Breakers,” feels so energetically stadium-ready. Co-produced by The National’s Aaron Dessner, the band has said that Hummingbird is a progressive change: “I definitely think the album represents a lot of growth for us as musicians we pushed ourselves a lot to try new thing, experiment. On a lyrical emotion level I feel we dug a whole lot deeper laid a lot more things bare and tried to be more honest.” Listen to “Breakers” below and decide for yourself:
As we mentioned back in October, Toro Y Moi aka Chaz Bundick has a crisp LP primed called Anything In Return due out 1/22 via Carpark. As he has modestly shifted his scope from late ’00 chillwaver to house, funk-hop beatsmith we’ve been following the prolific musician the entire way. First cuts off the record “So Many Details” and “Say That” both offer Bundick’s varied approach to intelligently danceable music that puts him in a chasm betwixt producer and songwriter. There’s little doubt that this is Bundick’s most anticipated record yet. Watch the video for “Say That” below:
Hmmm... quite a lot new releases for the month. It seems that there is a lot we can expect in this year as compared to 2012. We hope that it truly becomes an abundant year of new releases.