What started out as a solo project of bare bedroom recordings by Ryan Lynch has garnered immediate blog buzz due to Lynch’s previous guitar work with Girls — the Bay Area band whose Elvis-Costello-channeling Album ranked among last year’s most acclaimed records. For this official debut EP, Lynch has been joined by vocalist/keyboardist Hannah Hunt. On “Run Like Hell for Leather”, the street-busker strumming that marked the earlier works is now augmented by both programmed and hand drums of a tropical flavor as well as boy-girl harmonies that call to mind the Vaselines. The title track further bolsters the otherwise stripped-down sound with buoyant synths, while “About My Girls” (stream below) boasts a whirling hook behind Hunt’s dreamy coos and Lynch’s wistful croon: “I just can’t seem to forget/About my girls”. After the jump, check out an acoustic performance of “Clawing Out at the Walls”, set in some idyllic yet subtly industrial hideaway — a setting that perfectly befits this band’s evolving aesthetic.

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Buy this at iTunes. And be sure to check out Dominant Legs as they open for Mystery Jets in New York and Los Angeles later this month.

Australian imports are usually packaged with a bolt of lightning — hard-charging rock explosions in the vein of AC/DC, Silverchair, and Wolfmother. With Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride, the Sydney duo of Aimee Nash and Scott Van Ryper emerges as the new face of Aussie rock: a drugged-up stew of distorted guitars fueled by the American bands Nash and Van Ryper toured alongside and brought into the studio to lend a hand on the recording. The Brian Jonestown Massacre’s Ricky Maymi and Leah Shapiro and Peter Hayes of Black Rebel Motorcycle Club are just three of the reasons that Buy the Ticket boasts such a West Coast neo-psychedelic drone. “Gone Without Feeling” and “To Never Know You” dig up Oregon rockers the Dandy Warhols via Nash’s ethereal vocals.

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Buy this at iTunes.

It seems like Nathan Williams has emerged from his smoke-filled van and got his head into some real nice vitamin D. On King of the Beach, the Wavves’ leader ditches the under-produced garage-punk of his first two records for a cleaner and far more pop-oriented collection of songs, majorly influenced by Southern California. The entire album, like the best punk rock, is imbued with a casual, but never tossed-off, air of fun. The songs feature addictive ’80s hardcore-like vocal melodies and crisply produced guitars. It only took two or three plays before I had the epic riff of “Super Soaker”, and its sentimental foil, “Take on the World”, stuck in my head. For King, Williams indoctrinated a new rhythm section — drummer Billy Hayes and bass player Stephen Pope — who cut their teeth (and who knows what else) for the late Jay Reatard.

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In February, Definitive Jux effectively closed its doors from making any more music, and El-P — the progressive hip-hop label’s founder, boss hog, and chief curator — stepped down from his post as the NYC label’s artistic director, effectively ending an era in indie rap that owes more than its fair share to El-P’s hard-hitting style. As we all could have predicted though, you can take El out of the Jux but you can’t take the Jux out of El. With Weareallgoingtoburninhellmegamixxx3, he’s created an industrial shakedown of laser shots (“Take You Out at the Ballgame”), howls (“Drunk with a Loaded Pistol”), and fresh-to-death remixes (Kidz in the Hall’s “Driving Down the Block” and Young Jeezy’s “I Got This”). Void of any vocals, the album stands as El-P’s answer to J Dilla’s modern classic, Donuts. The instrumental medley thrives on succinct transitions through “Whores: The Movie”, “Meanstreak (In 3 Parts)”, and “DMSC”, before launching into “Time Won’t Tell”, a slow-building but pristine, driving beat that evokes one-time label-mate RJD2’s The Horror. Best is saved for last, however, with the Mothership Connection of “Contagious Snippet” and the hard-hitting 1980s drum-hype behind “Eat My Garbage 2”. On Weareallgoingtoburninhellmegamixxx3, El-P reminds us all where he came from — what comes next remains anybody’s guess.

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Buy this at iTunes. After the jump, check out an interview El-P did with Ford Models.

“Hallo?” Jahmek Power shouts into his mobile phone, the sounds of a raging party drowning out his valiant attempts at being heard. “I’m at a pahty. I’m going to leave the building because it’s way too loud.” Once outside, the situation gets worse as party-goers start asking the artist known as Jammer for directions. “This is the pahty here. I’m doing an interview bruvva,” he says as his patience wears thin. “Because I’ve come outside, they think I work here or somefink.”
     Contrary to what it might sound like, Jammer is in fact an extremely professional fellow — particularly when compared to his fellow grime masters, like Dizzee Rascal, Wiley, and Tinchy Stryder. Grime superstars (and unknowns) are notoriously unreliable, notoriously competitive, notoriously antagonistic. Jammer is none of these things. “A lot of people didn’t expect to be in the situation they are in,” Jammer says of the grime mentality. “They had a talent. They loved music. They done it and didn’t know they were going to get that much interest. I don’t think they was really ready for it. I’ve been doing this for ten years. I have an understanding of how things work and how necessary it is to let people know about what’s happening.”

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This Portland, Oregon, threesome is known for its free-form experimental style of progressive rock. Electronic instrumentation and vocals that sound like discount Damon Albarn have resulted in Menomena being filed in the indie slot. On its fourth full-length, Mines, the trio have created a scaffold upon which to arrange its wandering jams. Not losing its exploratory tendencies or curbing its quality musicianship, Menomena has used this framework to create defined songs instead of dense, meandering sounds. More emotional than before, the unfortunately named “Oh Pretty Boy, You’re Such A Big Boy” offers honking horns and measured organ stabs that speak straight from the heart. Theatrical to the extreme, the chorus of “Five Little Rooms” blasts against tethered piano and thunderous drum work. While these two are the standouts on Mines the album has a solid hold on melody that has eluded Menomena in the past. The band is developing a distinct song structure without losing any musical chops in the process — the best of both worlds.

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“We were already, already bored/Sometimes I can’t believe it/I’m moving past the feeling”, sings Win Butler on “The Suburbs”. With its simple pianos and otherwise stripped-down sound, the opening track from Arcade Fire’s third album immediately announces the Montreal band’s attempts at (and, perhaps, anxieties over) departing from the baroque bombast that has become its hallmark. Given the name of the album, much focus has centered on how Arcade Fire might be moving from the political provocations of Neon Bible to critiquing the impact and ennui of residential sprawl in modern society. And while that theme appears throughout the album, just as salient is the corresponding unease with passing time and the inevitability of change as Butler croons that “the clock keeps ticking” over unadorned guitars on “Modern Man”. Yet, The Suburbs’ standout tracks are those that indeed dwell in the past, reminding the listener of the grand theatrics of Funeral and Neon Bible, such as “We Used to Wait” and “Suburban War”, which features the lyrics: “You said the past won’t rest/Until we jump the fence and leave it behind”.

Last summer, like the scattered showers that unpredictably color a July afternoon, Bethany Cosentino and Bobb Bruno, better known as Best Coast, drizzled a handful of noisy love songs upon the Internet — each one adding a few minutes to the season’s soundtrack. The songs were lo-fi and reverbed to the point of distortion but, with Cosentino’s disarmingly sweet voice, proved to be an essential summer combination. Nevertheless, with every addictive melody chugging along at a similar mid-tempo, repeat plays made overdose inevitable.
     The songwriting on Crazy for You, Best Coast’s full-length debut, is more diverse and assertive than on the band’s early singles, making those songs sound like rough demos of half-baked ideas. The noise here has been turned down, morphed into a vibrant haze that surrounds and buoys Cosentino’s voice in a real ’60s-girl-group style. Songs wobble between the Jesus-and-Mary-Chain drum-n-fuzz of “Honey” to the up-tempo indie-pop of “The End” — and though there’s still plenty of reverb, it sounds like Cosentino’s the one controlling it, not the other way around. Even when she’s saying nothing at all, just oohing along with the music, it’s still great to hear her sing.

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Less is more — so much more when in the hands of Mountain Man. Made the Harbor, the debut by this Vermont-based trio of women, is a musical meditation harking back to pastoral scenes and folksy tunes of a passing America. Molly Erin Sarle, Alexandra Sauser-Monnig, and Amelia Randall Meath produce spartan instrumentation and rapturous vocals that are brimming with an unassuming charm. The effect makes for a daringly beautiful release. Far beyond gimmicky or complicated messages, Made the Harbor manages to be organic, earnest, and competent. The stately, “Dog Songs”, blends to the soulful, “How I’m Doin”, and then to the rapturous “Honeybee”, as the doleful notes of a singularly plucked acoustic guitar complement the bountiful, uplifting harmonies. On the road with the likes of The Low Anthem and Deer Tick, the ladies of Mountain Man will perform at the Wilco-curated Solid Sound Festival, August 13-15, before joining Sigur Ros’ Jonsi in Europe and North America this fall. These siren songs promise unexpected glories once reserved for a choir of angels.

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Buy this at iTunes. After the jump, check out a performance of “Honeybee” overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge.

The Bazombo trance troupe from Congo have released their eagerly anticipated follow-up to 2005’s Congotronics 1, not to mention collaborations with Björk and Herbie Hancock. On tracks, like “Mama Na Bana” and the epic “Makembe”, effervescent blips — produced organically by steel rods resonating against hollowed wood — and the polyrhythmic patter of drums forged from scrap metal, car parts, pots, and pans resound with hypnotic chants, whistles, and soukous guitars. The subsequent effect fuses the futuristic with the old-fashioned, invoking the glitchy electronics of Aphex Twin and dense tapestries of Can matched with more traditional touchstones, like Fela Kuti. At times, the songs’ relentless jubilation can be a tad overwhelming; but just when you think you cannot take much more, Konono softens and slows it down with “Nakobala Lisusu Te”, Crash Position’s stripped-down finale, featuring only septuagenarian patriarch, Mawangu Mingiedi, and his thumb piano — and then they are gone. It’s the act of master craftsmen wholly confident in the power they wield over their audience — giving and taking away as they deem fit, always leaving them wanting, demanding more.

Buy this at Other Music or iTunes. After the jump, check out a live performance of “Makembe”.