2:30 PublicityI was reading a piece in the latest issue of Exclaim wherein Nicholaus Sparding of Love Is All commented on the band’s inability to get arrested in their native Sweden, perhaps on account of their refusal/inability to adhere to what’s typically thought of when you talk about Swedish indie – that is, elegant pop of the orchestrally twee persuasion.

And perhaps that’s why I ultimately ignored their debut, 2006’s Nine Times That Same Song – I really like that elegant, orchestrally twee pop, particularly delivered in a Swedish accent, and that’s most definitely not what Love Is All are about, except maybe the accent part. From Josephine Olausson’s gleeful caterwaul to James Ausfahrt’s skronking saxophone, Love Is All are resolutely scrappy, abrasive and frantic. The Cardigans, they are not.

But score one for personal growth, as I’ve given the follow-up A Hundred Things Keep Me Up at Night more of a chance and am pleased to find myself coming around to its charms. Within Hundred‘s ten tracks there reside a handful of lustrous pop jewels that no amount of sonic dirt can dull – manic lead single “Wishing Well” and the Spector-iiffic “When Giants Fall” chief amongst them – and the numbers that don’t reach the same level of inspiration do their best to compensate with loads of anarchic energy. I can’t say that Love Is All are an outfit that I necessarily see myself forming a long and lasting relationship with, but for a good night out, you could do far worse.

And on that note, Love Is All are about to kick off a North American tour which will bring them to the Horseshoe next Thursday night, December 11. Courtesy of Against The Grain, I’ve got two pairs of passes to give away. To enter, email me at contests AT chromewaves.net with “Love Is All I need” in the subject line and your full name in the body. Contest closes at midnight, December 8.

Exclaim has posted up the complete transcript of the interview that seeded the feature mentioned above, and The San Francisco Bay Guardian also has an interview with Josephine Olausson.

MP3: Love Is All – “Wishing Well”
Video: Love Is All – “Wishing Well”
MySpace: Love Is All

One of the nicest things to show up in my inbox lately is from New Yorkers The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart, whose ’80s-vintage jangly/fuzzy brand of pop is as twee-friendly as their name. Pretty much what you might expect from a band on the venerable Slumberland marque, and totally scratching an itch I’d forgotten I had. Their self-titled debut will arrive on February 3 and a short Winter tour brings them to Toronto on February 12 for a show at Neutral.

MP3: The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart – “Everything With You”
MP3: The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart – “Come Saturday”
Video: The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart – “Everything With You”
MySpace: The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart

The Wedding Present, for whom POBPAH are currently opening a string of dates in the UK, have released a download-only, throwaway (my subjective opinion) Christmas single, complete with video. The Gedge is really into this Californian lifestyle thing, from the looks of it.

Video: The Wedding Present – “Holly Jolly Hollywood”

The title track from Los Campesinos’ new record We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed is now available to download.

MP3: Los Campesinos! – “We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed”

Contact Music interviews Asobi Seksu. Their new album Hush is out February 17.

BBC talks to Noah & The Whale, who are set to release a mini-album under the guise of their A-Sides punk band persona, just in time for Christmas though just barely – it’s out December 22. They also give some hints about the direction album number two – currently in production and the reason for their cancelled North American tour – is taking.

And also cancelled is CSS’s December 15 date at the Opera House. I guess the Brazilians finally discovered that December is COLD in the northern hemisphere (actually they say it’s due to visa issues).

And those of you who didn’t get tickets to Franz Ferdinand’s show at Lee’s tomorrow night – which is most of you – may be heartened to know that they’re doing another tiny show at the Masonic Temple (aka MTV Canada studios) on Friday but the only way to get tickets is to listen to CFNY (aka “The Edge”, to those of you under 30). Whether you’re willing to make that great a sacrifice to try and get tickets is up to you.

March will prove to be a good month for those whose tastes run towards the rootsier end of things. First, March 3 brings the Middle Cyclone (artwork!), the new album from Neko Case (she talks to Paste about making the album and buying a farm – A farm, not THE farm), and on March 31 Great Lake Swimmers will release their latest, Lost Channels.

MySpaceJust a quick one today. When America goes on holiday, things slow waaaaay down and, apparently, I get stuck in Northern Britain.

Now free of record labels, Scotland’s Idlewild are taking the “cutting out the middleman” ethos to heart by going direct to their fans to finance their next record. As The Guardian reports, they’re soliciting pre-orders even before recording has commenced, and for the tidy sum of fifteen quid, fans can get a fancy edition of the CD when it’s released next Spring, a thank-you in the liner notes of said CD, access to 15 live downloads culled from their upcoming residency at King Tut’s in Glasgow where they’ll be playing all their albums in their entirety and a sense of immense self-satisfaction in the knowledge that they’ve supported the band in a more meaningful way than buying a t-shirt. Full details and the ability to partake are available at idlewildmusic.com. The album is still untitled – perhaps they’re coming up with a special “gold sponsor” package that allows the donor naming rights? Raffle off the cover art? I’m just having fun, I don’t think it’s a bad idea at all though fifteen pounds is a fair bit of cash.

In keeping in the “Don’t Look Back” theme of those King Tuts gigs, Drowned In Sound got frontman Roddy Woomble to ruminate track-by-track on their 1999 debut Hope Is Important, incidentally the only one of their records I don’t have.

Video: Idlewild – “When I Argue I See Shapes”
Video: Idlewild – “I’m A Message”
MySpace: Idlewild

This Is Fake DIY has a video session with Frightened Rabbit.

And keeping things Scottish a bit longer, Franz Ferdinand talk to The Guardian about one false start in seeking a producer for Tonight, which is out January 27 and will look like this. And congratulations to Stephanie, who won the tickets for next week’s show at Lee’s Palace. To the other billion people who entered, sorry!

Clash and The Indpendent talk to Glasvegas.

This Is Fake DIY reports that Maximo Park have completed recording their third album, but also that mixing and mastering still has to happen, so don’t look for it too soon.

And yeah, that’s it. Told ya.

FacebookI’ve given away a lot of tickets and passes and whatever over the years, but I think these may well be the most Wonka-riffic, sought-after ducats I’ve ever actually had to dispense.

Franz Ferdinand’s December 4 show at Lee’s Palace, one of a handful of club-scale, North American shows the band is playing in advance of the release of Tonight: Franz Ferdinand on January 27, sold out in half a heartbeat. So I imagine that the fact that, courtesy of Sony BMG Canada, I have a pair of tickets to said show to give away, will be of great interest to those who didn’t get lucky in that first 30 seconds or so after the tickets went on sale. So if you want to throw your hat in the ring for these, email me at contests AT chromewaves.net with “I want Franz Ferdinand to take me out” in the subject line and your full name and mailing address in the body. Contest closes at midnight, November 27 (Thursday night).

And these are physical tickets… so if you win and even think for one single second about scalping them, I will call down a cosmic-scale karmic tornado to descend upon you and wreak untold miseries. I’ll do it. I swear.

“Ulysses”, the first single from Tonight is streaming at their MySpace. Alex Kapranos talks to ABC Australia, Reuters and Exclaim! about the direction of the new record.

MySpace: Franz Ferdinand

Francesca TalloneThe most striking thing about Parts & Labor’s last record Mapmaker, even more than the massively buzzing wall of synths, unrelentingly anthemic songwriting or Dan Friel’s more Bob Mould than Bob Mould vocals – it was the maniacally propulsive drumming of Christopher Weingarten. His breakneck tempos kept the entire record at the very brink of either taking off into orbit or utterly collapsing under itself. So with him having left the band after that record, it was reasonable to question whether their new album Receivers would be able to measure up to Mapmaker‘s adrenaline rush?

And in measures of pure energy, the answer is no. New drummer Joe Wong is hardly a slouch but he doesn’t play at full throttle in the same way as his predecessor, and accordingly the record is less relentless and chaotic, but also more tuneful. The addition of Wong and also second guitarist Sarah Lipstate have shifted the personality of Parts & Labor sufficiently that trying to directly compare the two records (as I’ve been doing) isn’t really appropriate. In terms of analogies, if Mapmaker-era Parts & Labor was Husker Du, then the Receivers era can be likened to Sugar. Hell, the none-more-pop of “Nowhere’s Nigh” sounds like it could have been taken straight off Copper Blue, like the mash-up of “If I Can’t Change Your Mind” and “Helpless”, rendered in keyboard. Which, incidentally, qualifies it as maybe one of my favourite songs of the year.

Rest assured, Mapmaker fans, Parts & Labor haven’t mellowed out. Receivers still buzzes and wails in all the right places – it simply trades a few BPMs and a few notches of cacaphony for a bucketful of melody, and that’s a trade I’d make any day. They’ll still make your fist pump and your head bob. It may simply not hurt quite as much the next morning.

The band are currently on tour and will be in Toronto on November 21 for a show at Sneaky Dee’s. Bassist BJ Warshaw talks to The San Francisco Bay Guardian and Spinner about the band’s solicitation of found sounds from their fans to use on the album while Friel covers similar ground for Tuscon Weekly.

MP3: Parts & Labor – “Nowhere’s Nigh”
MySpace: Parts & Labor

Franz Ferdinand’s Nick McCarthy discusses the band’s next album Tonight with Drowned In Sound. The album is out January 27 and they’re playing Lee’s Palace on December 4.

Brendan Canning has released another video from Something For All Of Us…. He and the rest of Broken Social Scene will be at the Sound Academy on November 27 and 28.

Video: Brendan Canning – “Churches Under The Stairs”

Also with a new video are Death Cab For Cutie.

Video: Death Cab For Cutie – “No Sunlight”

NPR is streaming The Decemberists’ show in Philadelphia from last week. They’re currently in the midst of releasing the three volumes of their Always the Bridesmaid vinyl single series and are targeting an April release for their next proper album, Hazards Of Love.

It’s still just Fall but if looking ahead to Winter (note I didn’t say “looking forward to” because that’d just be madnesS), one of the acts for next year’s WinterCity festival has been announced. On February 7, The Stills will play a free show to the huddled, freezing masses at Nathan Phillips Square. No word yet who’ll do the same on January 30. Looking a little more short-term, they’ve got four nights at the Danforth Music Hall starting tonight.

New York’s Longwave release their fourth album and first in three years today – Secrets Are Sinister is streaming in its entirety at Spinner.

Stream: Longwave / Secrets Are Sinister

And also streaming and out today is The Sound Of The Smiths, the umpteenth compilation of The Smiths.

Stream: The Smiths / The Sound Of The Smiths

And finally, over at Spin, they’ve got the whole of Just Like Heaven, the Cure tribute album due out on January 27. There’s some commentary from the particpating artists over here.

Stream: Just Like Heaven: A Tribute To The Cure

Facebook…Okay, not exactly tonight, but very soon. Scottish quartet Franz Ferdinand won’t be releasing their third album Tonight: Franz Ferdinand until January 27, but they’re looking to drum up interest beforehand and remind people of a time when the disco hi-hat beat was fresh and novel. To that end, they’re booking a string of club dates in venues the size of which they haven’t played in some years (I think they went from the 350-capacity Horseshoe in February 2004 to the 2000-capacity Kool Haus four months later and then the 3000-plus Docks by October).

Anyways, this time they’ll be at Lee’s Palace on December 4 for an intimate dance party with approximately 500 of their lucky fans. Tickets are $25 and go on sale next Thursday, November 13, at 10AM. There’s also been a December 9 show in Vancouver at the Commodore Ballroom, so it’s reasonable to think that there’ll be an announcement with proper tour dates across North America in the not-too-distant future. But for now, the Canadian dates are all you get.

I haven’t paid too much attention to the band since their ubiquitous debut, but I just spun it again last night and enjoyed it more than I expected. How was You Could Have It So Much Better? Would it make a casual fan a believer or is it more of the same? I’m curious. Not that it’d affect my inability to attend the show either way – prior engagements with a certain Mr. Young and Mr. Wilco that night.

Rolling Stone and Exclaim talk to frontman Alex Kapranos about the new album while Chart covers the same ground with guitarist Nick McCarthy.

MySpace: Franz Ferdinand

Maximo Park’s Paul Smith talks to Spinner about making their third album in Los Angeles while living in fear of wildfires and being swallowed up by the earth. The band have some videos of their stay in the city of angels at their YouTube channel.

Emmy The Great discusses the single “We Almost Had A Baby” with I Like Music. The single is out on Monday and First Love, the album from whence it comes, is out in January.

Video: Emmy The Great – “We Almost Had A Baby”

Robyn Hitchcock discusses the next Venus 3 album with Paste and his past solo works with The Chicago Sun-Times. The aforementioned Venus 3 record, Goodnight Oslo, will be released on February 17.

Pitchfork reports that Swedish pop-smith Loney Dear – now comma-free – will release a new album entitled Dear John on January 27. They’re also streaming a new track from the record.

Stream: Loney Dear – “Airport Surroundings”

Drowned In Sound has run the second part in their interview with The Dears’ Murray Lightburn, the first part of which ran in mid-October.

Casiotone For The Painfully Alone have a date at 6 Nassau (the cryptically-named new venue in Kensington Market located at 6 Nassau St) on November 15. The Post has an interview with Mr Casiontone, Owen Ashworth, whose Town Topic EP was re-released at the end of September

PitchforkTV is currently streaming the Dirty Old Town live doc featuring Ted Leo & The Pharmacists. I bought the DVD of this like three years ago… still haven’t watched it. Like most music DVDs I buy.