Music Anyone who has heard even a lick of Animal Collective's music has to admit  they are one of the strangest bands to have captured the attention of the indie scene lo these past 15 years. And with the release of its most recent album Centipede Hz, the band's popularity continues to grow to the point that their fan base seems to b...   More

Album Reviews [PACIFIC NORTHWEST BRITPOP] One of the bona fides touted by the trio Pictorials in its bio is how the head of Badman Recording Co., Dylan Magierek, asked the band to record an EP after the group h   More

Music According to Unknown Mortal Orchestra's Facebook page, its new album for Jagjaguwar is finished and ready to be mastered. So what does that mean? We have to wait until 2013 to get our hands on it!! Not cool, fellas. Well, at the very least, UMO knows...   More

Music Pure Bathing Culture, "Ivory Coast"
I don't profess to really understand what's going on in this new Pure Bathing Culture clip -- a video for the song "Ivory Coast," directed by Sean Pecknold -- but that's fine by me. I like mysterious things even when they do invol...   More

Arts & Books As the minutes ticked away past midnight on January 1, 2000, a sense of calm and joy sunk in over the world. The superstructures of the world avoided any Y2K insanity, and the symbolic turning of the page on a new millennium became something to simply celebrate. The world has never been as confident since. Disasters both man-made and natural have befallen the planet with alarming regularity. ...   More

Music As I said this week in my review of the new Mike Coykendall record, it is a bit of a shame that the initial focus  people have been directing towards Chasing Away The Dots is the big names associated with it. Take this track, for example, which features backing vocals from t...   More

Album Reviews [GIVE THE SIDEMAN SOME] The latest solo effort by Mike Coykendall is probably going to be the one that finally gets this erstwhile backup musician some long overdue attention. Unfortunately, tha   More

Arts & Books Walking into the world of TBA:12 for the first time was a rather disorienting. The beefy security guards seemed far too on edge for an arts festival. And the staff and volunteers carried the harried and exhausted look in their eyes that I remember seeing in the mirror during the first few months of my son’s life. Smile as they might, you could tell the late nights, and the care and feeding of th...   More

Album Reviews [VOX HUMANA] I don’t envy any new artist trying to get themselves noticed these days. Unless they’re packing some major-label heat, the only way to crack the full-to-bursting head and hard-dri   More

Music Stories [SOUND AND VISION] If you ever want to hear the sound of grown men and women reduced to the giggly wonder of 10-year-olds, cue up some YouTube videos of Amon Tobin’s current live show. The 40-   More