Backed by a few synths and a light guitar strum, Electric Owls‘ Andy Herod has pieced together a surreal soundscape for Ain’t Too Bright opener “Magic Show”. It’s an energetic tune that is true to the pop sensibilities Herod’s previous group, The Comas, never seemed to quite reach. Where The Comas pumped out one rock tune after another, Herod now seems more than comfortable writing pop songs that have a light rock edge, but don’t stray too far into his former stomping-ground.

This bit of news may be slightly old, as the session went up last week, but I’m just now catching up on my Daytrotter-ing and it seemed fitting. Coincidence: earlier this month I was scrounging around on eBay looking to see how much that vinyl copy of Eudora would go for (just an estimate, not because I want to sell it – don’t you do that will your records too?), and I wondered if The Get Up Kids would give us anything new soon. Of course, they regrouped …

I’ve only begun to absorb EELS‘ last album, Hombre Lobo. It’s pretty good, I tell you; got that gritty edgy pop/rock sound familiar to the Southwest, and even bits of Texas (I’m thinking about you, Austin). Well the latest tidbit to come from the band is that they’re gonna drop a new album, their eighth studio release – and that the new album will hit stores January 19! That date is well under one year after the release of Hombre Lobo. Today they announced the tracklist …

As a whole, the original Alpinisms warrants much praise. Songs like “Iamundernodisguise”, “Half Asleep” and “Connjur” are, quite literally, among the best electro-pop songs released this year. And, in some ways, School Of Seven Bells defies that genre classification, as their music strays into an occasional repetitive shoegaze, hints at a little feedback filled noise, and dives headlong into a swirling and dreamy atmospheric state.

Surprising a fact as this may be, I am pretty much unaware of the music reviewing world. This is a fact I plan to rectify from now on, as there are surely several blogs and sites worthy of my time and attention. I did a little digging when approaching “New Bones” by So Many Dynamos, a song that many relate to Fugazi, dub as post-punk with forays into math-rock, or said this positive thing or that negative thing… and I start to see why I tune so much …

“Desert Song” may be buried somewhere in the middle of Edward Sharpe And The Magnetic Zeros‘ latest LP, Up From Below, out as of last week on Community Music / Fairfax Records, but it’s the intro to their twelve-part, feature-length movie-musical. The song features an intro filmed by singer Alex Ebert’s mother and a chant by his father.