Guy Capecelatro III’s last name may be hard to pronounce, but the list of people he’s opened for are anything but. This list includes the venerable Elliott Smith, Bill Callahan’s SMOG, and the late Vic Chesnutt. Furthermore, he’s a frequent collaborator in a current favorite: Brown Bird. Excited yet? I am.

Isidore, if you’re unaware, is Jeffrey Cain (formerly of Remy Zero) and Steve Kilbey (The Church), with the former on instrumentals and the latter lending vocal expertise. The collaboration came as a surprise, after Cain passed along an instrumental album to Kilbey only to receive it back later with vocals added in. The duo is now poised to release Life Somewhere Else on Valentine’s Day.

I always get excited when something new by Eux Autres comes across my desk. The ex-Portland, now San Francisco brother-sister duo plus third member Yoshi Nakamoto (The Aislers Set, Still Flyin’) will release a new EP called Sun Is Sunk via Bons Mots Records on February 28. Recorded by Jason Quever (Papercuts), expect Sun Is Sunk to push the boundaries of what you know about Eux Autres.
The Larimer siblings (Heather and Nicholas) have always created highly infectious, French-influenced garage pop, and that continues in “Right Again”. …

Mexican Summer is the type of label that when it puts out an album, you give it your full attention. Unfortunately, I’ve been vacant of late. This is tragic, though the good news is that Mike Wexler has brought me back into the Mexican Summer light. A dreamy psychedelic pop sound, filled with chill ambient sounds, borderline haunting with Wexler’s vocal rasp. It makes songs like “Pariah” very cool.

Brutal honesty: I’m stuck on Helvetia’s 2011 album The Lam right now. In particular the first track (“Saucer of Dread”) and track 3 (“On the Lam”). Helvetia has returned with a new track called “A Mirror” and it embodies precisely why I dig this band: epic soundscapes, driving shoegaze riffs, hazy melodies, downtrodden vocals.

In a way, I kind of miss the days when Of Montreal gave us songs like “Disconnect the Dots” and “The Party’s Crashing Us” and even “The Past Is A Grotesque Animal”. Paralytic Stalks seems a different beast entirely, filled with further psychedelic pop experimentation than we’re used to from Kevin Barnes and company. The more I listen to it, the more I get it. This album is not supposed to be an easy listen.

Something dark and immense haunts the pop that Ben Heywood (Summer Darling) masters on his new release Skills for the Long Emergency under the name Heywood. From the depths of a post rock, shoegaze haze, Heywood will just as readily produce mind-melting noise as it will dive into an obscure, dream-like melody.

To me, being an indie music fan is all about being an explorer, discovering new and untapped realms of audio heaven. One of my favorite things to experience is to stumble upon something astonishing in all its brilliance. An artist I didn’t know. An album that blows my mind. Or a single song that simply appears out of nowhere. I have no clue how Siskiyou‘s “Always Awake” found its way onto my laptop, but boy am I glad it did.

“Television Youth” blends power pop, garage rock and fuzzy punk for a fun — playful, even — sound that reminds me a bit of the early works by The Thermals. The band is Sonic Avenues, the latest addition to Dirtnap Records. They are four Montreal natives (you can just barely hear that French Canadian accent in the vocals… just) that produce loud, raucous, exhilarating music that simply begs to be heard.

On their 2008 debut, Freedom Wind, The Explorers Club likened their pop music to classics. The harmonies were what did it; saturated in layers and filled with male-on-male falsetto, that album had Pet Sounds written all over it. Nearly four years later, the band has returned with a new EP called The Californian Suite — very Beach Boys-esque, too — and with it, those to-die-for harmonies.