eMusic Selects

Brandon Mitchell isn't Norwegian. So why is he crafting such satisfying cosmic disco? It's a coastal thing. Mitchell, who records under the moniker Altair Nouveau, has lived in California for much of his life — with a short stint in Seattle — where things move at a slightly slower pace, and the sun shines deep and bright. Which is why his synths bubble and buzz contentedly under slow, grooving drum machines that often sound just like the real thing. Where else but near the sea does someone write an ode to Carl Sagan's Cosmos and have it come out sounding like the best single Ratatat never recorded?

Soundtracks, clearly, are a key influence for Mitchell. "Death on Four Wheels" was originally composed for one, and the percolating keyboards on "Street Thunder II" are clearly aching to be licensed by the director of the inevitable remake of Midnight Run. (Mitchell's moustache could some day give Moroder's a run for its money as well.) My favorite moment of Altair's Dark Energy, though, is on the title track, as our boy transitions from solitary funk to drop a pounding kick drum and three separate synth lines interlock to create a bed for some sort of Viking death march. It's the sound of a talented young producer fusing together a few of his favorite sounds to weird and wonderful effect. Highly recommended.

Just as you can never dip your foot twice into the same spot in a river, you can never hear a Julianna Barwick composition a second time. The uncannily poised Brooklyn performer builds her reverberant cathedrals of vocal harmony alone, piling her voice slowly and purposefully up in layers, and every time she sits down to record, it is a new experience. From a few wispy strands of melody, she erects massive, dreaming towers of sound; listening to her music is like witnessing an entire city rise from the ground and crumble back into dust. But when Barwick's foot comes up off the looping pedal and the last echo fades into the air, so does the piece you have just heard. You may still be sitting there spellbound, but Barwick has already moved on, to the next improvisation, the next show, the next moment. The methods might be constant, but the song never remains the same.

Which only makes this ineffably gorgeous six-song EP that much more precious. As a document of Barwick's trancelike approach to music-making, it is fascinating, a window into an intensely personal and spontaneous creative process that sometimes resembles a Zen spiritual practice. But taken at face value, as an album that rewards and demands repeated listens, it is just as stunning. The circling, high-pitched cries that wing the edges of "Cloudbank"; the small, heartbeat-like sound Barwick makes with her mouth on "Choose" that serves as the song's pulse before morphing gradually into a buzzing synth; and maybe most of all, the glittering ice palace that Barwick conjures on "Anjos" with just two rolling pianos, phased apart a la Steve Reich, and some wordless "ooohs": — such moments only increase in wonder when you realize they're essentially byproducts of a fruitful improv session; it's a reminder of just how much beauty you can spill out armed with nothing more than faith in serendipity and a little courage.

As an album, Florine is an immersion in the pure pleasures of sound: Anyone who has ever held down a foot pedal on a piano, banged out a chord, and sat there savoring the resonances will find deep satisfaction in the simple beauty of Barwick's voice as it layers endlessly atop itself. But Florine is much more than a warm bath in a New Agey reflective pool; her on-the-spot compositions are labyrinthine, and you can spend a lifetime getting lost in just one of them. Maybe Julianna has already moved on, but we're going to stick around for awhile with Florine; there's just too much here to discover.

Mary Pearson and Rob Barber are Brooklyn-based duo High Places and 03/07 — 09/07, as the title suggests, collects the band's work from a six-month period in 2007. Some of it has been released on 7-inches and compilations, some of it is available on eMusic exclusively for the first time. All of it is eMusic Selects. The best description I've heard of the band's tunes? "Every national anthem going off at the same time in a bucket of water." Indeed, High Places ride that careful line between unadulterated anthem and a muddy effects-laden mess, emerging with discombobulating dubby masterpieces.

"Head Spins" bounces along on aquatic steel drums, good vibes and a melody built from samples drained almost completely of their source material. "Sandy Feat" is Beat Happening via King Tubby. Perhaps the most surprising moment is a commission that the group received from Pearson's mother. She asked the duo to write a song for the elementary school at which she teaches. "Jump In" doesn't have a lot of the murkiness that colors much of High Places output thus far. Instead, it nakedly showcases the bells, whistles, woodblocks and doodad's that the group buries underneath. It's a revelatory moment here — Pearson and Barber aren't just noiseniks having fun, they're first-rate pop songwriters.

With their short songs and inclination toward miniaturized releases, it's clear that High Places aren't big on mission statements. You could fairly say that 03/07 — 09/07 reflects what happens when a classically trained bassoonist heads out of the academy (Pearson) and a former hardcore kid gets into the noise scene (Barber). Sure, it's awfully specific and honest, but that's pretty much the charm of High Places. Jump in.

Breathe Owl Breathe sing of folklore and homespun miracles, oral histories left to thaw in the earth's crust until pre-history's giant ice cubes rolled their wet bulk down the North Pole and into Canada, finally settling into extinction in what we now call the Great Lakes. It's from the shores of these bodies that Breathe Owl Breathe come (Ann Arbor, Michigan, to be precise), and it's in the shadows of those hollowed troughs that these eight songs rest. These are songs about being left behind, songs about being dead, songs without geography, songs worth repeating.

The music is very economical — guitar, cello, drums, piano, other organic sounds — and the vocals float between folk and country, a very earnest mood. It sounds a lot like Smog — singer Micah Middaugh and Bill Callahan have similar voice boxes — and at other times early Lucinda Williams, Victoria Williams and, in the case of "Your Cape," even Loretta Lynn. There's a distinctly — and very specifically — American folk tradition at work here, and I don't get the feeling that Breathe Owl Breathe at all mind their limited scope.

The kinda stuff that drew Alan Lomax and Harry Smith deep into Appalachia and the American South forms the foundation of Breathe Owl Breathe's spare, rustic sound. When singer Micah Middaugh belts, "I've got a toboggan," in the last cut, it could easily pass for a boast, a cataloguing of lower-class luxury the way bluesmen might sing of women and whiskey. Mostly Middaugh and his Colombian co-vocalist/cellist Andréa Moreno-Beals sing about ghosts and winter (it is a descriptive album title), sometimes literally ("Playing Dead," "Toboggan," "Sabertooth Tiger") and sometimes in the context of a relationship ("Your Cape," "Sylvia Plath").

The marriage of their music and lyrics is the sort of chance meeting that becomes a 60th anniversary in a blink. Middaugh, Moreno-Beals and drummer Trevor Hobbs are easy and fluid with one another, enabling their songs to (deceptively) feel more like happy accidents than serious, premeditated songwriting. That's where their charm lies. And that's why we chose them for eMusic Selects. Whether or not you're listening hardly matters: this music has always existed, and always will.

After the first-ever Crystal Stilts show in December 2003, Hamish Kilgour of New Zealand band the Clean approached them and said: "You guys were fantastic, the most interesting of the night — it reminded me of when I went to England in '83 and bought the first Jesus & Mary Chain single." Could there possibly be a better start to a career? As Stilts bassist Andy Adler announced, after sharing the anecdote when we met the band, "it's all downhill from there."

Having endured a Job-like start to 2008 (all of their gear stolen — wait, make that impounded), just a few weeks ago the Stilts were confronting whether they should even continue being a band, a notion all the more absurd after you listen to these seven songs — the bulk of the Brooklyn foursome's recordings to date. Sure, Hamish probably overstated it a bit — who knows, though, we weren't there — but there is something in these dingy recordings of minimalist post-punk pop that supersedes pretty much everything else we have heard in a long, long time.

The two best songs are "Crippled Croon" and "Converging in the Quiet," their sullen, confident melodies shining brightest, their fidelity sounding the most like something post-Edison in the history of recorded sound. "Crippled Croon" is mush-mouthed and loose, an upper-register guitar line recalling everything great about Echo and the Bunnymen, early Cure and that whole bag, with Brad Hargett's vocals slackadaisical to a ridiculous — and endearing — degree.

"Converging" is the better-written song, the little post-chorus instrumental bit really nice and cinematic, the whole thing extremely well put-together in a way that — and we say this with love and affection — some of their other songs are not. "Converging" strikingly intersects Hargett's buried-alive vocals, JB Townsend's shrugging guitars and Adler's gesturing bass in some awesome heroin-spike harmony. Though it didn't start out as such, it's now by far my favorite Crystal Stilts moment.

There are others, too, including the really rough demo for "Through the Floor" that we drunkenly convinced the band to include (thanks guys!). Somehow, the rougher-sounding the better with these kids, and in a way that goes beyond the whole warehouses & lofts & sirens & streets & broken windows & peeling walls Brooklyn fetish. Farther down 'neath the hipster mythos, reverb topography and the band's rough treatment are amazing songs by four smart and funny people who we couldn't be prouder to support. You're gonna love this. We promise.

We are living in a post-indie world. Over the past decade, indie rock has slowly and deliberately shed its roots in the punk and hardcore movements of the '80s: we've gone from to Lou to Sufjan as our de facto figureheads. The challenging aesthetics of the SST/Touch & Go ('80s and '90s editions) crowd have been softened to more traditional — albeit skewed — forms of songwriting, production and performing. Part of it is the influx of money (and yay for that — people need to get paid!), and part is the bar for what "matters" getting raised. There's no use judging that shift — it was inevitable — but it is worth pointing out that the maturation has marginalized artists who don't toe the (anti-)company line. The stuff that's poppy and cute gets popular; the stuff that challenges does not. It's a meritocracy of sound, so the question is: is there any room left for the weirdos?

All of this is sorta related to our two new eMusic Selections: Hands On Heads and Susu, a trio from Brooklyn. To put a contemporary tag on them, Susu play noise-rock. To put a more appropriate but less faddish tag on them, they play math-rock and/or post-hardcore. You will certainly hear echoes of Sonic Youth in these six excellent, fierce songs, but there's also lots of Unwound, Hoover, Don Caballero and basically the entire city of Chicago from 1992 to 1998. So yeah, you could call Susu a throwback — cuz they are. (You could also call them awesome, cuz they're that, too.)

The intensely loud, epic and barking "Hands Up (The Race)" jumps out immediately. "I've got MY/ Hands UP!" and "Get! Your! Handssssup!" yelps singer/bassist Michael Andrew as Andrea Havis' guitar and Oliver Rivera-Drew's drums swirl, clash and implode around him. From there it fits and starts, churning, chugging and soaring a bit like Unwound's best moment, "For Your Entertainment" off of Repetition.

"Anarchitect" is the math-iest song here, from the clever title to the awesomely idiotic lyrics ("An architect/ Had no neck/ It's not that interesting/ But it is happening") that somehow convince you to shout along by the ending reprise. And then there's "In the Pool," Win's propulsive sleeper hit. All three Susu members are incredibly talented musicians, and it really shows here, with Rivera-Drew doing a great Damon Che with his tom work, Havis slaying with her open-chord hangs in the verses and Andrew flogging the horse with his pounding bass.

Win could have come out on Dischord or Touch & Go in 1993, which is meant as a compliment. It's a record that doesn't fit into now — now, these days, meaning within your last RSS feed — and that's a genuine shame. The underground was where the marginalized once went for solace, but hegemony is a bitch, and so now there must be an underground within the underground within the underground. There, Susu clearly have a home and an audience; our hope is that this excellent collection will get them even more.

Get in. Get dizzy. Get out. That's the slashed-up synth-pop gameplan of London's Hands on Heads, a quartet whose hyper-caffeinated songs hover around the one-minute mark. There is method, though: doses of frantic keyboard skronk quickly give way to bouncy singalongs, often several times in the same song. And don't say they didn't warn you: raucous blurt of an album opener "Is An Umbrella Really Necessary?" lasts all of 35 seconds. No wave don't mean no fun.

Erase Errata's mangled guitar scratches, the one-finger keyboard jabs of Numbers and even the wacked-out, life-affirming synth anthems of Atom and His Package echo across Hands on Heads. But it's neither tribute or regurgitation, as the songs — which they say are about "righteous joy" and "the supernatural everyday" — pummel while showing whimsy, even as they buzzsaw your skull. Check the descending bizzaro-carnival organ line on "Romantic Aorta" or the punk-playground anthem "X as Two Sticks," that galloping squall of a verse stopping on a dime for a surprisingly sing-songy chorus. Totally (Melt) bananas.

Through it all, Luke and Christopher (the bassist and guitarist who split vocal duties) yelp wide-eyed about not wanting to be alone, "drawing triangles on the walls" and other gloriously sincere teenagisms. On the sprawling (almost-three minutes!) "Witches & Lightning" (a demo we talked them into giving us because it's so awesome), we're told, "Right now/ I believe in you more/ Than facts and figures."

We're just surprised that they bought into facts and figures in the first place.

The 22-year-old Randolph Chabot is Deastro, a one-man machine synthesizing Death Cab for Cutie, M83, LCD Soundsystem and other future-rock practitioners into a glitzy world overflowing with regret. Keeper's' ten songs are culled from demos and home recordings Chabot pieced together in his parents' basement, a land decidedly far from the dance floors and neon-lit city streets of his music, a place where his bald yearning and incredible talents find no boundaries, a place where he still lives. Like any dreamer, Chabot's imagined world is infinitely better than the one where he resides, "a place where I am free," as he sings in "The Goodman of the House." After learning more and more of his life, I can't help but to think of Chabot as Bastion of The Neverending Story, a young man subtly shifting from spectator to hero in a world of his own creation.

And make no mistake: Keeper's is wholly Chabot's. Certainly M83 has influenced the cut of Chabot's jib, and his voice unmistakably shares qualities with that of Ben Gibbard. But the crisp, sparkling environs of Keeper's come from one young man, and one man alone. Chabot has no other collaborators, and his songs — even with their swooping electronics, enormous guitars and startling self-assurance — ring with a vulnerability that can only come from a belief that no one would ever hear them. Sure, they are about love and longing — universal inspirations — but they are also acutely idiosyncratic, the product of an imagination that has yet to meet an obstacle it can't thwart.

"The Shaded Forests," the album's amazingly pop track (if someone told you this was the new Killers single, you wouldn't blink), is built around the following lyric: "When the wolf lays down to marry the lamb/ He'll lay down his fangs, he'll lay down his plans/ I told you, we're gonna be fine/ I t-t-t-t-told you, we're taking our time" (that last stuttering revealing a bit of Ric Ocasek in our boy), as if he's Hansel telling Gretel to hang in there, we ain't no cake, yet.

Spiraling out from "The Shaded Forests" — and "spiral" is the perfect word for the towering, Autobahn tones of "Michael the Lone Archer of the North Shore" and the spaghetti sci-fi instrumental "Light Powered" — the album's heart rate ebbs, songs like "The Green Harbor" and "The Floating Cradle" emotionally naked and fragile: in the latter, Chabot's self-harmonizing falsetto beckons like a Greek siren. And then there's the cathartic "Leah's Daughter the Giraffe," strings plucking while Chabot gorgeously coos "Oooooh/ The difference is your… eyes."

It bears repeating: Randolph Chabot is only 22-years-old. Music like this doesn't just happen, especially not when only one person is involved. That wunderkind word used at the beginning of this review was carefully weighed, and we stand by it. To return to the fairy tale idea, this could absolutely be one. Except fairy tales end, and for Randolph, this is merely the beginning.

This delightful and highly inventive collection of lo-fi archival recordings is the result of a wonderful accident, one that's sent shock waves through both the soul music and the art worlds. The story goes like this: Back in 2004, a Washington, DC-based private investigator and soul aficionado named Dori Hadar went crate digging in a flea market and struck gold. Hadar discovered dozens of highly detailed, expressively-drawn R&B album covers from the late '60s and early '70s, with fake cardboard LPs inside them and, in some cases, even faked stickers affixed to the outside. They were by imaginary artists with names like Mingering Mike and the Big "D." One of them was a benefit album for sickle cell anemia; another was a tribute to Bruce Lee. After posting images and discussing his find on the Soul Strut website, Hadar knew he had to find the creator. Mingering Mike turned out to be a gentle recluse who declined much publicity; as it turned out, he didn't want to lose his two day jobs as a result of any notoriety. The music here is filled with bottomless joy and a true love for soul music and culture.

We're not joking about the fidelity issues. This stuff was recorded on cheap condenser mics using home equipment almost 40 years ago. Mingering Mike makes Daniel Johnston sound like ELO when it comes to sound quality. But none of the music is unlistenable by any means. "But All I Can Do Is Cry," for instance, actually exploits the funky equipment to its full potential. With a weirdly distorting handclap (I think?) that sounds like a broken drum machine, the song could be some forgotten union of Suicide and the Commotions. All of the album's beats are provided by proto-rap beat-boxing or the sound of an Afro-pick hitting a phone book. The sounds of trumpets, guitars and bass all come from vocals provided by Mike and his cousin, the Big "D." There are bizarre faux-African numbers ("Mandingo"), a lengthy dirge about getting buried alive ("Nail in My Coffin"), and love songs that follow the arc from infatuation to love ("There's Nothing Wrong With You Baby"). The immediate hit has to be "Coffee Cake" — a hilarious, 10-minute paean to the joys of coffee cake which makes superb New York School poetry when presented in written form ("The man said it was in this aisle/ Over in the sweets and bread section/ I haven't had it in a long time/ Tastes good with ice cream!"). If there is any justice in the world, the song will make it on to thousands of mixtapes. Adventurous music fiends will discover a brilliant populist hiding beneath Mingering Mike's mask. All you have to do is listen.

Be sure to visit Mingering Mike's homepage for more on his remarkable story and to get a look at his incredible art.

A hi-res version of the cover of Super Gold Greatest Hits is available here

The mod pop of the late '60s — Small Faces, Kinks, etc — fathers Sprengjuhöllin, its orchestrations, its openly emotive moods and somewhat fey inclinations towards grandeur all representative of the naiveté and boldness of youth. But just because mod fathered Sprengjuhöllin doesn't make it their destiny. Instead, the deeper you get, the more diffuse their sound becomes: hints of Super Furry Animals and Gorky's Zygotic Mynci and other particularly European, skewed-pop bands shade the hues of these ten exceptional songs the wistful, fading yellow of a cherished photograph.

Assuming that, unlike Sprengjuhöllin, you are not from Reykjavik, there is a sizeable language barrier here. All but one of the songs is sung in Icelandic — the language does not share many cognates with English, lemme assure you — and so the normal, lyrical entryway is impeded, requiring us to connect much more on a musical level than a narrative one. (Fortunately we talked with two members of the band who explained to us what each of these songs is about, and you can find that information here. And you should read it, as their tales are amazing.)

The one English-language song, "Worry 'Til Spring," is an absolute marvel. It begins with a modest acoustic guitar and a hushed, brogue-ish tenor lamenting, "I've known her since June/ But she's always immune/ To every smile that I give her." And then, out of nowhere, comes a triumphant chorus: a French horn, some drums and a voice transformed from timid to bold, the impotent self-questioning now a declaration that even if the result is self-defeating, he will at least act: "I just want you to know/ That one day I'll let go/ And you can worry 'til spring/ And then I'll vanish." Any budding relationships should make this their theme song right now.

Elsewhere, Sprengjuhöllin vacillate between fuzzy rock and stark balladry — and they handle both with confident ease. "Keyrum Yfir Ísland" is the big rock number (phasers phasing, strummers strumming, geese a'laying); "Taktlaus" is the shiny, Jam-like punk tune; "Flogin Er Finka" is moving, piano-based Coldplay moroseness; and "Nú Er Tíminn" could have easily appeared on an early album from the Kinks or the Action — good, head-shaking '60s rock. And then there's "Sumar í Múla," in which the band consciously plays through the history of pop music from the '60s to today, incorporating Motown, disco, synth pop, Brit pop and much more into an awesomely goofy, awesomely awesome tune.

There's always a danger with foreign language albums to fetishize, to respond more to the otherness than the content itself. But with Sprengjuhöllin, this is absolutely not the case. These five dudes from Iceland make exceptional guitar pop, and we couldn't be prouder to present these ten songs to you. Dig in.
NOTE: For more on what exactly Sprengjuhöllin are singing about, click here!

"I am seriously depressed about my level of energy," Diva Dompe sighs at the outset the aptly-titled "Energy Song." Really? You are? Because if you're low on energy, the rest of us are stone dead, sad pale excuses for viable human beings. Throughout Blackblack Diva and sister Lola (with some assistance from ex-Phantom Planet vocalist Alex Greenwald on guitar) bound, leap, squeal and shout, barreling through eight gloriously ragtag pop songs, focusing on the frayed edges and the big blemishes instead of the shiny centers. Blackblack make imperfection perfect, proudly brandishing ragged guitars, pounding on busted drums and choosing a giddy holler over a practiced croon.

It's the revival of a lost aesthetic, the same kind of ragged charm favored by old-time indie heartthrobs like BMX Bandits and Talulah Gosh and Marine Girls, the order of the day before someone showed up with the soap and water and singing lessons and turned the whole enterprise into a crash course in good manners. "The Most! The Best! The Greatest!" is impish and hyperactive, Diva and Lola belting out the chorus — "The most! The Best! The Greatest! Foreverrrr! Foreeehhveehhrrrr!" — over and over as guitars collide behind them. They veer beautifully off-pitch again and again — which is precisely what the song demands.

It doesn't hurt that the sisters sound like grade schoolers, their voices brash and naïve. In "I Wish I Were a Scientist" Diva could be a 6 year-old dropout, pouting, "I wish I were a scientist/ but I've never been good in school" as guitars twitch and cymbals crash haphazardly. Elsewhere she's introspective, sighing "do you like sugar in your tears" atop moping bass. And if the music is just as green -- a cluster of bare guitar chords, some out-of-time drums – so much the better. It's the kind of wild abandon some people call "amateurish," some call "winning," some call "punk."

Here's something else you can call it: energy.

For a country-rock outfit, Blue Giant boast a pretty serious indie pedigree. Their lineup includes Kevin and Anita Robinson, the songwriting duo behind Viva Voce, on guitar and vocals; Chris Funk (guitarist for the Decemberists) manning the pedal steel; Seth Lorinczi (of Circus Lupus, among others) handles the bass, organ and piano; Evan Railton of the Swords Project on drums; and guest vocals from Sleater-Kinney's Corin Tucker. Throw in Bradford Cox (put him on tambourine duty, maybe) and you'd have a straight flush.

As it stands, this might look like an unlikely crowd to tackle No Depression-style alt-country, but it seems every indie-rockers' inner Gram Parsons will out, and the Robinsons, thankfully, aren't using country-rock to play dress-up. There are no Carter Family covers here, no songs about pushing plows or "drinkin'." They seem more interested in country-rock's purposeful timelessness, the pointed way it strips away frivolities and forces economical songwriting.

They have risen to this implicit challenge; every song on their sturdy debut EP bears the long, clean lines of classic country-rock. The opening track, "Target Heart," hinges on the plainspoken phrase "you keep shooting at my target heart." Save for this repeated lyric, and others very close to it, there's not much else going on: alternating C and G chords, a patient drum beat and shimmering threads of pedal steel reverberating into the empty spaces. But it's hypnotic and absorbing, each flourish — a billowing guitar here, a gentle wash of cymbals there — registering with heightened impact.

The rest of the EP is just as special, whether it's the foot-stomping rave-up "Blue Sunshine," which veers closer to Appalachia than most alt-country acts dare go; or the sweetly sashaying "Lonely Girl," which suspends Anita's wispy croon over more glowing webs of pedal steel from Chris Funk. You might not think that years in a hyper-literate indie-pop band would be adequate apprenticeship for country-rock, but Funk turns out to be an extraordinarily sensitive pedal-steel player, and he might just be Blue Giant's secret weapon, the element that sends these simple, rough-hewn songs skyward.

The EP closes on a darker note, with swirling strings and arpeggiated guitar spiraling downward as Kevin gravely warns: "Come hell or high water, you're gonna love me." It's a hint at a broader range, which we now have the pleasure of waiting for; for the time being, though, this EP is lovely company, and a promising debut in its own right.

Nils Edenloff, the lead singer for the Rural Alberta Advantage, possesses a complete and utter inability to sing with any measure of distance or cynicism. With his nasal, earnest voice, Nils pleads, pledges, confesses, praises and laments. Give him a slice of history like the 1903 disaster in the Canadian mining town of Frank, Alberta that buried an entire town alive beneath a rockslide, bodies still dug from its ruins decades later, and what does he sing? "Under the rubble/ The mountain that tumbled/ I'll hold you forever/ I'll hold you forever," on "Frank, AB." There's an urgency to Nils and Amy Cole and Paul Banwatt, his bandmates. Absorb, experience, write an amazing song about it, repeat.

Hometowns, the RAA's spectacular, doe-eyed debut, isn't the stuff of teenage love, sappy love letters or rapid infatuation. The band sees love in its soup, for sure, but it's the very best kind: earnest and sincere, and honest in its limitations. Take the gorgeous "In the Summertime" and its heart-skipping refrain: "And once in a while/ I know our hearts beat out of time/ And once in a while/ I know they'll fall back in line," all of it delivered in a soft, stoned coo that summons aorta butterflies and eye grins.

One of the first things that will undoubtedly jump out after you download Hometowns is how Neutral Milk Hotel it is. And it's true. Jeff Mangum has obviously impacted this album; he and Nils have similar vocal tones ("non-singer singers" was how Nils described it in our interview) and a similar urgency. Mangum always sounds on the verge of death, each word potentially his last. The RAA doesn't go that far, but the spirit is there. Maybe every sixth word is a "Rosebud" rather than each and every one, but when you hear it, you know it.

The biggest difference between the RAA and NMH comes in the rhythm section. The Arcade Fire, by piling rhythms in endless layers, have helped steer indie into grandiosity — which was it's Achilles Heel in the '90s — and the RAA have taken those lessons to heart. For one, the lineup of the band is essentially Nils singing and playing guitar and Amy and Paul playing percussion. (Amy and Paul contribute more than that — Amy sings quite a bit, for instance — but that's their primary role.) This leads to songs like "Rush Apart" and "Four Night Rider" and "The Deathbridge in Lethbridge" being extremely percussive, explosive even.

In what is probably the least objective close I can imagine, Amy said something really striking to me in our phone interview last week, something that speaks eloquently to why we love this band, and why we chose them for eMusic Selects. Here's Amy: "I remember talking to Nils after we finally got the record and I listened to it all the way through the first time. And I remember talking to [Nils] and saying, 'You know my favorite part about the record is that I believe you. I believe in what you're saying. I totally buy it.' " Simply put, we buy it, too.

Editor's Note: We have put together an amazing (if we may say so) set of liner notes that you can download for free here. It includes great artist art, Q&A's with everyone involved and a whole lot more. It's slick, and our thanks go to Jess Larrabee for making the beautiful cover and Dave Scott for designing the liner notes. We are indebted to you both. We also want to note that while it's not ideal that this album be bundled together like this, it's extremely important to us that everyone here get a fair shake, and that this be consumed as a whole. After you listen, we hope you'll agree.

On the one-year anniversary of eMusic Selects' creation, we are thrilled to unveil Selected + Collected, a 16-track tour of what excites us the most about music right now. The vast majority of these artists are completely unsigned, but they are not toiling away in obscurity. Far from it. These artists are making incredible music, and there are audiences out there waiting to hear it. Isn't that what it's all about?

Let's walk through the compilation, track-by-track.

Blurbs written by Yancey Strickler, Jayson Greene, Alex Naidus, and Joe Keyes

Girls
"Hellhole Ratrace" is the model of fucked-up perfection. It has the washed-out crackle of a bedroom recording, about four chords and three lines of lyrics. And even once it has spiraled to completion after seven minutes, you will want to hear it again. Immediately. Such is the blissful effect of San Francisco’s Girls — a pure pop band, big, clean and bold. "Hellhole" itself is a bonafide psych epic, full of echo-y sleighbells, a chorus of cooing background vocals, big ascending washes of distorted electric guitar and an endlessly repeating vocal line so effective, the melody acts more like a mantra. It’s a towering achievement, and surely not their last.

Obits
We've been anticipating this album, this song, this moment for a bit over two years. That's when we first got word that Rick Froberg, formerly of Drive Like Jehu and the Hot Snakes, had a new project in the works, a band that was endlessly rehearsing but never playing out. That changed with an internet-legendary debut at the Cake Shop, and quickly after that signing to the actually legendary Sub Pop Records, who will release I Blame You, their debut and the origin of "Light Sweet Crude," on March 24th of this year. PS: It's amazing.

Glasser
It's the mood more than anything else: dank, haunting and almost spiritual, dead-eyed hymns for the new dark age. Glasser write songs that are more about texture than shape, each one a blissed-out siren song, a soundtrack to a long night of Ouija boards and hypnosis. "Apply" is stark, tribal trance, all steady, skipping backbeat and strange, shrieking ululations. It's the sound of mystery set to rhythm, the greatest ghost story never told.

My Teenage Stride
Jed Smith doesn't sleep. It's not possible. It seems like the man generates a new My Teenage Stride song every hour of every day, each one of them just as warm and winning as the last. Other artists affect a hoity-toity attitude, waiting half-decades between albums and then submitting slabs of hard-to-handle art-rock. Jed has no time for that. It's all hooks, hooks, hooks: loud, fast and made out of silver. In an age where concept is king, Jed is as close as we've got to our own personal Brill Building.

Eagle Boston
"The best band in Berlin," declared a friend of ours upon recommending Eagle Boston for inclusion on Selected + Collected, and we are not about to disagree. We don't have much to compare them to, we'll be the first to admit, but who is willing to go on the record as being against spooky and taut no-wave disco-punk from another planet? From the synth sighs to the vocals, barked like a premonition of impending and irreversible doom, "Satan Highway" is exactly right.

Salem
"Redlights" succeeds with an unlikely but brilliant marriage of sounds, anchoring an icy synth-pop melody with thundering, crunk-influenced drum programming. The beat is vintage Mannie Fresh, all fake, skittering high hats and booming low-end – it sounds especially revelatory paired with the dark, shrouded female vocals and ultra-distorted bass lead. The result of this inspired A + B is a swaggering party anthem.

Homeboy Sandman
Homeboy Sandman first came to our attention in 2007 on the New York subway. He had papered over every car of the train with little flyers, in which his head was superimposed on a Street Fighter II character (Ryu), complete with thought balloons about challenging Christopher Columbus to a duel. We checked him on Myspace, and, to our delight, found it full of playfully verbose raps that refused to either wallow in gangsta cliches or to hector us about sternly about Big Issues. On "Buttermilk," he dances for three minutes on the edge of a classic soul beat, showing us the edge where sense dissolves into sound.

Altair Nouveau
Altair Nouveau has something that all too many new cosmic disco producers lack: thump. "Cosmos" isn’t just a heady trip, lazer-packed and drippy, it’s a dense, bumping ride. Warm analog synth sounds are layered and tweaked, propelling the song with an almost manic energy. The six-and-a-half minute track never once drags, dialing in and out new melodies and sounds. Altair’s inventive, almost playful style makes "Cosmos" a thrill in headphones or on the dancefloor.

Rademacher
That piano. It comes charging out of the gate, a bold and pounding statement of intent. Fresno, CA's Rademacher are not one for the small gesture, and "If U Got Some Magic" is proud and purposeful. It pushes without detonating, getting grander with each go-round. "Some questions are tough/ Some don't got answers at all," Malcolm Sosa sings halfway through the song. Maybe so, but that doesn't mean they're not going to look.

She Keeps Bees
We've never been the fan-club type, but we'll gladly start one for Brooklyn's She Keeps Bees. Jess Larrabee (vocals, guitar) and Andy LaPlante (drums) coalesce into a rock & roll machine, their instruments economical and their passion unending. Over the course of a handful of records — all with handmade, collaged covers, which is why we asked Jess to make the cover for this album — Jess and Andy have drilled down hard into their own vulnerabilities, emerging with garage-rock that manages to be both fierce and self-aware. Just incredible.

Bow Ribbons
"Peace Sundress" feels like a trance, an indoctrination, a way out of this tired life and into a new one without possession or worry where we stand and sing, stand and sing. The quiet and contemplative beauty of "Sundress" extends to all of Bow Ribbons' recordings, the duo of Willow and Pete possessing an incredible talent for spacing, the chasms between her hushed words and his deep accompaniment pregnant and alluring.

Victoire
Victoire works the nebulous area where "indie" edges into "modern classical" — an increasingly well-populated field these days. What sets Victoire far, far apart from their peers, however, are their compositional chops: the young composer Missy Mazzoli, a fixture on the New York new-music scene, writes the music, and it has a sturdy under-girding that gives its dreamlike reveries a weight often missing from other indie-classical hybrid types. The evocatively titled "A Door into the Dark," like all their music, feels like a too-vivid dream from which you may never awake.

Man/Miracle
Man/Miracle have boundless energy. "Pushing and Shoving" starts with some fevered chanting, proceeds with galloping drums and caterwauling vocals and ends with a bit of a noise fest, all cymbal bashing and gang handclaps. Somehow, amidst the ruckus, there is a charming and insistent pop song. As it all crashes down, you can hear it – the swaggering, slurred vocal melody, the super simple, very catchy two-chord guitar part and, yup, those handclaps ringing out on the off-beat. Just short of three minutes, "Pushing" barrels along, finishing almost before you can recognize its charms.

Deastro
Randolph Chabot is a genius and a superstar, and the faster we all realize that for ourselves, the better off everyone will be. A musical wunderkind, Chabot has taken Deastro from a parent's-basement musical project to eMusic Selects (he is the sole repeat offender on the compilation) to a deal with the beloved Ghostly International to an upcoming electro-rock album entitled Moon Dagger that is going to blow everyone away.

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart
Few bands right now leave their fans quite as unreasonably giddy as the Pains of Being Pure at Heart. Maybe part of it is that extravagant name; a statement of intent if ever there was one, maybe even a line drawn in the sand with a bashful toe. "Kurt Cobain's Cardigan," like the songs on their near-perfect debut, is a happy alchemy of a hundred beloved but little-known bands, a song that is alive to the possibilities of great pop songs that makes your life feel like a coming-of-age movie and coming-of-age movies feel like your life.

Jumbling Towers
Though the epic "The Kanetown City Rips" does not prominently feature it, it was an organ that first brought us to Jumbling Towers. On the group's incredible self-titled debut and digital EP, a big hawking organ leads the way, its whirs and hums a perfect match for singer Joe Deboer's frenzied, Dracula-like vocals that got an astute comparison to Vincent Price in an eMusic member review. But on "Kanetown" the Towers are thinking big. Really big. Like a concept album about post-apocalyptic 1981 Detroit big. "Kanetown" is part of that cycle, and we can't wait to hear the rest.

Missy Mazzoli, the young composer who writes the music for the all-female modern classical ensemble Victoire, seems to have a private line on mute anxiety, on quietly nagging uncertainty, and on the four short pieces that comprise the Door Into the Dark EP, she taps it with effortlessness bordering on the uncanny. Her urgent, enigmatic songs feel like 3AM dispatches garbled by a bad connection, with only the occasional loaded phrase puncturing the static. The band's combination of chittering electronics, found sound and repetitive string and woodwind lines eloquently conjures how it feels to helplessly grope for words that don't exist to describe disquiet we can't place, how it feels to be left alone with only the colors of our own thoughts for company. Victoire live in the up-close dots of a Seurat painting, the point where a seemingly clear picture dissolves into incomprehensibility. You can squint and focus, but the harder you train your gaze, the further everything breaks apart.

The five-piece group — rounded out by Eileen Mack on clarinet, Lorna Krier on keyboards/electronics, Eleonore Oppenheim on bass and Olivia De Prato on violin — exists in a nebulous area between indie, chamber pop and modern classical. Many of the groups currently floating in this sphere use their lack of genre simply as an excuse to write vague, underdeveloped music, but Victoire turn indeterminacy to an advantage. Structurally speaking, a song like "I Am Coming for My Things" is made of nothing: it is built on a terse, flat voicemail message from an utterly defeated-sounding woman ("I am coming for my things ...I don't have any money"), scored with the flutter of a single violin, the ghost of a cello and a softly keening clarinet. That is (mostly) it, save for an equal-parts violent and beatific meltdown at the two-minute mark. And yet the piece hums with the exquisitely alive awareness of a Webern miniature, each voice calling out, profoundly alone, into the cavernous white space surrounding it.

"Door Into the Dark" finds a similar allure in ambiguity, both harmonic and emotional. De Prato's violin delicately walks up and down the same five steps with a hesitant, reiterative rhythm, as if continually correcting itself mid-thought. Mack's clarinet floats somewhere in tonal limbo behind it, sounding long, yearning low notes, before both trail off unexpectedly, leaving behind only the watery keys, which feel like the last traces of a dream, the vague shapes that remain after your eyes open and the details have fled your consciousness.

The dark-horse element that gives Victoire's soundscapes their teeth and texture is undoubtedly Lorna Krier's mesmerizing keyboards and electronics. On "Like A Miracle," a fluttering, processed "aah" that pans left and right is both captivating and disorienting, like sunlight glittering on water. Then, a distorted MIDI piano wells up from the background and slowly devours the track whole. On "A Song For Arthur Russell," an insistent tapping somewhere between Morse code and a clacking typewriter beats away while keyboards, clarinet and processed vocals pulse in the foreground. Like all the songs on this beguiling EP, it urges you to lean forward, to decode the message just out of earshot. But there is no secret, nothing that needs unlocking, just four gorgeous and inscrutable pieces of music worth puzzling over.

Luke Winslow-King was born in Michigan and moved to New Orleans a decade ago, a familiar migration for many a Midwestern boy, its loose women, all-night jazz and free-flowing drink a kept promise to hungry-eyed dreamers everywhere. Post-industrialization, it's the reason why anyone moves to a city: boredom. A limited gene pool for procreation. A life defined by family, clergy, teachers, coworkers, boyfriends, whoever. Not defined by you being what matters.

The adopted home of New Orleans defines Old/New Baby, Luke Winslow-King's incredible new record for eMusic Selects. Its Dixieland and ragtime jazz — stronger beacons than any lighthouse — don't just influence these songs, they direct them. Winslow-King is familiar with M. Ward and the other indie singer-songwriters of the day ("All the Same" and, structurally, "The Sun Slamming the Highway" in particular exhibit familiar traits), but both the root and the dressing of all twelve songs come from the parishes. There's banjo, sousaphone, washboard, trumpet, trombone, slide, clarinet, accordion, viola, cello, you get the idea, all of it played, arranged and recorded expertly. (Engineer Earl Scioneaux — through whom we discovered this album — deserves tremendous credit.)

As you might expect, the music itself is intensely likeable. From the tuba huffs of "As April Is to May," it's non-stop charm: sly horns, jazz guitar, a housebroken little slice of New Orleans culture. Sometimes the band gets hot — "Birthday Stomp" especially — and they tumble all over each other, jockeying for prime microphone position. The arrangements add to the feeling, the structure simultaneously cohesive and loose, the kind of feat only the skilled can pull off consistently.

Broadly speaking, Old/New Baby breaks down into two distinct song types: songs to regale the whole family while the prized daughter gets dressed upstairs, and songs to get her undressed later on. Give this man a ukulele and he is as likely to sing a goofy song about being sleepy ("Never Tired") as he is to sing about a boat gone-a-rockin' ("St. Andrew's Ferry"). This was once the province of traveling men, the troubadours and bluesmen fathers wisely warned their daughters about.

There's something of that traveling troubadour to Winslow-King, that romantic notion of the wandering soul whose songs reveal deep truths and faraway lands. He's spent the past few years playing the New Orleans streets, and now he makes his bid for this little internet neighborhood of ours called eMusic. We hope he never leaves.