Who are your favorite new discoveries?

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Permalink Reply by Taylor Martin on April 3, 2009 at 11:10am

The Ting Tings seem to be doing some interesting stuff. Locally Tonos Triad. Great swing with a drummer who plays a suitcase. Bigger Than Elvis is always good live. They play at Radio Radio on the first Saturday of the month. Sleepytime Gorilla Museum is fab, too.

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Permalink Reply by Laura Frank on April 3, 2009 at 12:39pm

I wrote about this a little in my last blog post, but I'm kind of digging this group out of Kansas called Drakkar Sauna. I saw them Sunday in Bloomington and they are a two-man band. One guy plays the guitar while stomping on a tambourine tied to his left foot and hitting a bass drum petal with his left! I thought it was great...like Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins. Not to mention the name of the band is an awesome reference to an awesomely bad cologne from the 90s.

Others: Vampire Weekend gets some heavy rotation in our house, The Broken West, Locksley, Rogue Wave...

@Taylor, I'm with you on the Ting Tings, as well as Bigger than Elvis.

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Permalink Reply by Jennifer Wright on April 5, 2009 at 7:19am

I started a love affair with Gomez (www.gomeztheband.com) about two years ago when Todd mentioned how much he liked the album How We Operate. When I was in college, I had a similar love affair with Toad the Wet Sprocket and I hadn't had a similar experience with a band until I started getting deeply into the Gomez albums. I am very hooked at this point. They are an English band that have been around since about 1997-ish and have put out about seven or eight really good albums. I highly recommend a journey with their music. They just released a new one, called New Tide. However, I would probably start with How We Operate, to wet your palate.

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Permalink Reply by Pat Coyle on April 5, 2009 at 9:25am

I remember hearing Gomez on WTTS, bought 2 albums immediately based on the track I heard, and didn't find anything that interesting other than the radio song...I probably didn't listen hard enough. Plus, whenever I play CDs in the car it's never as good. I'll need to revisit.

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Permalink Reply by Todd Berryman on April 6, 2009 at 2:41am

Gomez is a good headphone/deep listening-type band. It does reward the focus, I think.

Agreed on How We Operate as a nice starting place, but if that one's problematic, the live album Out West is another good point of entry. Far from being a greatest-hits-with-crowd-noise collection, it's actually masterful in terms of the drive in their reinterpretations of their best work. In its way, it's like Frampton Comes Alive! or Mad Dogs and Englishmen in that it presents the music in the best possible light, becoming an event in itself as part of the process.

Recently, I've gotten very attached to the Bon Iver album For Emma, Forever Ago, especially the song "Re: Stacks" which closes the album. This is one of those cases where I got attracted by the title of the album first, and then discovered the press about it, and then discovered it wasn't hype. Very folky, and he's got an unusually lupine falsetto, so I'll grant right out of the box that he won't be everyone's cup of tea, but I find this guy's music very rewarding in a way that much else is not.

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Permalink Reply by Dave Gibbs on April 6, 2009 at 11:51am

Tiny Handgun (Seattle)
http://www.myspace.com/tinyhandgun
http://cdbaby.com/cd/tinyhandgun

Wolfy (Indy)
http://www.myspace.com/wolfymusic1

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Permalink Reply by Dave Gibbs on April 6, 2009 at 3:28pm

PS I have also recently discovered the Fleet Foxes from Seattle (very recent).
http://www.amazon.com/Fleet-Foxes/dp/B0017R5UAA/ref=sr_1_1/190-2218...

The editorial review on Amazon misses the full Seattle music scene. This covers much of Seattle music that is not grunge. This melodic style has been very much part of the indie scene there for years. It just hasn't been exploited by the record cos.

I don't know more than the samples you can find, but I like their melodic song writing.

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Permalink Reply by Todd Berryman on April 10, 2009 at 6:51am

Love Fleet Foxes...they've got this timeless aspect, even when they rock out, that makes me think of madrigals, or of groups like the New Christy Minstrels in the sixties, probably as much a function of their production as their performance. The layering of voices, instruments and the overall feel of the arrangements...there's not a lot else like them out there. (The vocal similarity between Fleet Foxes' Robin Pecknold and Jim James of My Morning Jacket that some reviewers have remarked on is the beginning and end of the similarity, I think.)

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