If you have any friends that are all like, “Yeah, Karen O’s totally awesome,” slap them upside the head with Magik Markers’ Balf Quarry.

The 52-second opening track of Idaho, Alaska’s Manipulate And Multiply — a grinding, lyric-less and feedback-driven arrangement — teases you into thinking that the Lexing

Metroschifter are at their best when they speak with their instruments, not their mouths.

Yim Yames (aka, um, Jim James) is intimate in his six-track EP homage Tribute To, recorded a few days after George Harrison passed away in 2001.

He’s prolific, no doubt, but the better of Sam McBean’s two musical endeavors is not this band, it’s the other: Black Mountain.

Ex-Eleventh Dream Day and current Freakwater vocalist Janet Beveridge Bean heads an eclectic roster of Chicago-based musicians, and their debut is rather surprising.

Whoever happens to be in charge of deciding release dates at Lujo Records deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom or the Nobel Prize or something roughly equivalent. Maybe a Klondike bar.

Invaders are much more than a fuzzed-out version of The Merediths, but that’s the starting point.

I never learned through the album’s 20 tracks what exactly 2-3 stood for, but I will say that after my 2-3rd listen, I liked what I heard.

As far as careerist schemes go, naming your band Nothing People and titling your first album Anonymous has to be pretty high up on the list of bad ideas.