Celeste Danger, Elisabeth YoungHaving spent most of 2008 on the road and working their self-titled debut to death, Brookyln’s Jealous Girlfriends are quite understandably taking the first part of this year off to recover and recharge. And, in the case of singer/guitarist Holly Miranda, work on a solo record. Well, judging from her MySpace blog, work on the solo record has been ongoing for some time – since late 2007 at least – but presumably the time available now will allow it to wrapped up and hopefully see the light of day.

Details are scarce, but production duties appear to have been handled by TV On The Radio’s David Sitek and it will feature appearances from Celebration’s Katrina Ford and TVOTR’s Kyp Malone. The project may or may not be named Raven Mayhem and the album may or may not be called The Magician’s Private Library. Whatever it’s called, there’s a good number of tracks – demo or completed is unclear – at her MySpace and they sound quite compelling. Some distance away from the Jealous Girlfriends’ rock attack, they’re more atmospheric and sonically adventurous while remaining firmly rooted by her marvelous, sleepy yet soaring rasp of a voice. Who/what/whenever this stuff comes out, I’m definitely interested to hear more.

Thanks to Spicy Times for not only letting me know that this project existed but also pointing the way to this FabChannel solo show recorded in Amsterdam last May, wherein we see some of Miranda’s singer-songwritery side. And Get Glucky got her to assemble and comment on a playlist of favourite songs.

MySpace: Holly Miranda

Spinner premiered the new video from TV On The Radio yesterday.

Video: TV On The Radio – “Stork And Owl”

Prefix reports that the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs album has a name – It’s Blitz. It’s due out sometime in the Spring.

Peter Bjorn & John are set to release their new record Living Thing on March 31 and will tour it across North America starting in April. Their Toronto date is April 25 at the Phoenix, and support for the whole tour will be Chairlift, who were featured in a Daytrotter session last week. PB&J have already released a video from the new album and Pitchfork premiered a remix MP3 of the first single earlier this week.

MP3: Peter Bjorn & John – “Lay It Down (Golden Filter remix)
Video: Peter Bjorn & John – “Lay It Down”

There’s a video from the new Loney Dear album Dear John, coming out next Tuesday.

Video: Loney Dear – “Airport Surroundings”

Stereogum has premiered the first MP3 from Marissa Nadler’s new album Little Hells, due out March 3. This ties in nicely with her previously-announced April 21 date at the El Mocambo with The Handsome Family. The Times talked to Nadler as part of a feature on what they call “goth-folk”.

David Berman has dissolved the Silver Jews. Maybe I should have gone to see them at Lee’s in September after all… Pronouncement from the man himself at the Drag City forums.

Clash interviews Of Montreal, who have released a track from their digital-only Jon Brion remix EP.

MP3: Of Montreal – “First Time High” (Of Chicago acoustic version)

NME talks to Final Fantasy’s Owen Pallet about his contributions to the new Rumble Strips record, currently in production.

It turns out the Born Ruffians/Akron/Family double-bill at Sneaky Dee’s reported on last week is also a double-header. In addition to the already-announced and nearly sold-out March 24 date, there’ll be a March 23 show, also at Sneaks, and the two will pair up again on the 25 and 26 at Il Motore in Montreal.

Franz Ferdinand’s Tonight is currently streaming at the band’s MySpace. It’s available this Tuesday. Conversations with the band are up at Clash, Metro and dose.ca.

Stream: Franz Ferdinand / Tonight: Franz Ferdinand

Neil Halstead drops by the Paste offices to play a song.

The Toronto Sun and The Ubyssey talk to M83 mastermind Anthony Gonzalez. They’re at the ACC tonight opening up for The Killers.

Send Me Dead Flowers talks to The Raveonettes’ Sune Rose Wagner.

Aquarium Drunkard gets a Robyn Hitchcock guide to New York City. Goodnight Oslo, his new album with the Venus 3, is out February 17.

JAM reports that the threatened new Neil Young concept album Fork In The Road (which concerns bailouts of banks and automotive manufacturers as well as electric cars) will indeed be released on March 31 and the promised Archives have indeed been pushed back. It’s probably safe to say this will be the least-welcome Neil Young album in the history of ever.

A farewell to Mr Mick Harvey, who has elected to leave Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds. Details at the ANTI Blog.

Liam HenryIt’s really of no surprise whatsoever that I misread the offer tied to pre-orders of Sky Larkin’s debut album The Golden Spike, which I reported on a couple weeks back. I had thought that by committing to the purchase, you’d immediately get MP3 downloads of both the album proper and the live recordings of the same songs. As it turns out, you just get the live set.

But that’s okay, because February 9 isn’t that far off and the live version of the record is really pretty good. It’s obviously a bit rawer than I expect the album to be – though not that much, I expect it to be raw – but the je ne sais quoi that I really like about this band is very much in evidence. I think it’s how they disguise a surprising melodic sophistication behind a youthful energy and directness. At first it sounds like scrappy, jagged pop – which it is – but it’s also much more than that. The already-released singles have been consistently terrific and the rest of the album isn’t far off. Can’t wait to hear the proper thing, and they’re definitely on my “to-see” list for SxSW this year.

They recently gave Drowned In Sound a song-by-song commentary on the record and there’s also interviews at This Is Fake DIY and The Yorkshire Evening Post.

MP3: Sky Larkin – “Molten”
Video: Sky Larkin – “Beeline”
Video: Sky Larkin – “Fossil, I”
Video: Sky Larkin – “Molten”
Video: Sky Larkin – “One Of Two”
MySpace: Sky Larkin

In curiously parallel fashion, The Reading Evening Post has album annotations for the other British debut record I’ve got coming to me in the mail hopefully not long after February 9 – Emmy the Great’s First Love, so in the interest of consistency I’ll link up all the videos released so far for songs appearing on the record (though I suspect “Easter Parade” and “M.I.A.” have been re-recorded for the album). And if you thought I was overly effusive about her, check out Drowned In Sound’s review of the album – they make me look positively measured in comparison. There’s also an interview over at Oxford University’s Cherwell.

Video: Emmy The Great – “First Love”
Video: Emmy The Great – “We Almost Had A Baby”
Video: Emmy The Great – “Easter Parade”
Video: Emmy The Great – “M.I.A.”

Camera Obscura haven’t let slip many details about album number four, now complete and set for a release sooner rather than later in 2009, but they did post a MySpace blog yesterday announcing that it when it was released, it would be by the venerable 4AD label.

Frightened Rabbit’s Scott Hutchison tells The Chicago Tribune how a failed relationship inspired The Midnight Organ Fight. You know, in case it wasn’t abundantly clear from the lyrics.

eye, The Telegraph and The List talk to Franz Ferdinand on the occasion of the release of Tonight, in stores on Tuesday.

Glasvegas have released a new video from Glasvegas. Their April 3 show at the Mod Club is totally sold out.

Video: Glasvegas – “Flowers & Football Tops”

Incidentally, support for the Glasvegas tour has been announced as Ida Maria, who is herself getting no small amount of attention. Her album Fortress Round My Heart got a major label release last year, but now that she’s gone indie again, she’s re-releasing a different version on February 9.

Video: Ida Maria – “Oh My God”
Video: Ida Maria – “I Like You So Much Better When You’re Naked”
Video: Ida Maria – “Stella”

I was dismayed to have missed Asobi Seksu’s visit to the Horseshoe back in October – way too much going on to go, if I recall – but will get the chance to make that up on March 3 when their tour in support of Hush, out February 17, brings them to the El Mocambo.

The Von Pip Musical Express has an interview with Juanita Stein of Howling Bells. The moving target of a release date for Radio Wars seems to have settled on March 2, but I need to confirm that. Update: NME is also saying March 2. We’ll go with that.

Minipop stopped in for a Daytrotter session last week.

Decider interviews Anthony Gonzalez of M83, in town at the Air Canada Centre in support of The Killers tomorrow night.

It’s an odd bit of contesting, but Annuals are giving away tickets to their show at the El Mocambo on Saturday night as well as a pair of passes to the Art Gallery Of Ontario. Yeah, I dunno. Enter here.

Tom BeardThe first time I heard of London’s Florence & The Machine was this past March at SxSW, when Rob from Donewaiting.com wandered over just before Emmy the Great’s showcase and said something to the effect of, “I just saw the greatest show ever. Florence & The Machine jumped into a fountain in the middle of her set, pulled someone in after her, climbed back out, got back onstage and kept playing”. I’m paraphrasing and thought he was exaggerating, but after seeing the video footage, I saw not.

And it’s fitting that I first heard of Florence (surname Welch) while seeing Emmy, because both are artists who’ve made an impression this year without benefit of a proper album. But while Emmy recordings, live and studio, have been relatively plentiful, the Florence & The Hype Machine pickings have been slimmer – basically just a handful of live tracks and covers to go along with her two officially-released singles thus far, “Kiss With A Fist” back in June and “Dog Days Are Over”, out next Tuesday.

But even based on just that limited sample, a couple things are obvious – one, she’s got some serious talent and two, she’s seriously batshit crazy. To the former point, her voice has both weight and power, equal parts aggressive and plaintive and capable of handling styles ranging from folk to theatre, blues to rock, whatever. To the latter point, most everything about her comes across as eccentric at least, and not just for her spontaneous fountain-jumping ways. Her songwriting showcases a girl who could generously (but affectionately) be described as “loopy”, a trait backed up by her videos. “Kiss” is a raw kitchen-sink stomp with gleefully violent lyrics that sound like they’ve come from the diary of a girl you should be afraid to meet (and yet still do) while “Dog Days” is a strummy, Summer-y bit of folk that builds into a technicolour soul-pop explosion. With those as reference points, there’s really no way to judge what her debut album will bring when its released in May 2009 of next year, but you can be damn sure it’ll be interesting.

The Guardian has an extensive profile on Florence.

MP3: Florence & The Machine – “Kiss With A Fist”
MP3: Florence & The Machine – “Postcards From Italy” (Beirut cover)
MP3: Florence & The Machine – “Girl With 1 Eye” (Live at London Calling)
MP3: Florence & The Machine – “Hospital Beds” (Cold War Kids Cover, live)
Video: Florence & The Machine – “Kiss With A Fist”
Video: Florence & The Machine – “Dog Days Are Over”

NME reports that Blur – including Graham – will be getting together in the new year to rehearse and, as Damon Albarn puts it, “see if we’re into it”. Can you say “Coachella”? No? How about, “bagloads of money”? I knew you could.

The Quietus talks to Bloc Party’s Gordon Moakes about the joys of new fatherhood.

Frightened Rabbit are keeping a tour diary for Drowned In Sound. They’ve also gone to the trouble of making a video for their contribution to the second Guilt By Association covers compilation due out on February 17, a cover of ’90s UK dance outfit N-Trance.

Video: Frightened Rabbit – “Set You Free”

Spin has posted a portion of their interview with Elvis Costello from this month’s issue. His new talk show Spectacle begins airing on December 3.

Chart interviews Nick Cave.

Yeah they were just here, and they were just here before that, but M83 are coming back again – this time on January 23 at the Air Canada Centre, opening for The Killers. Yeah. The sound you hear are hordes of M83 fans not rushing to get tickets. There’s also a new remix of M83’s “We Own The Sky” by Maps available to download.

MP3: M83 – “We Own The Sky” (Maps mix)

Portishead have made a new video from Third.

Video: Portishead – “Magic Doors”

The Scotsman salutes Rough Trade Records on the occasion of their 30th anniversary.

Frank YangIt’s amazing what a little tracklist editing can do. Though it goes against much of what I believe (album is sacred, blah blah), I’ve found that simply hitting the skip button on M83’s last album Before The Dawn Heals Us when a certain spoken word track starts improves the overall experience immeasurably. This revelation, combined with the fact that their latest effort Saturday=Youth has been growing on me much more since I reviewed it in brief, should have been enough to get me to the Opera House last Thursday night to see them live for the first time in some three and a half years. But it took the addition of School Of Seven Bells, whose debut Alpinisms has proven to be a real delight, to get me to commit.

I had been curious as to how School Of Seven Bells would recreate the decidedly studio-esque sounds of Alpinisms live, especially considering the fact that the three principals didn’t equate to a full conventional live band. In other words, I was wondering if they’d have a drummer. Answer – no. The band was guitarist Ben Curtis flanked by the Deheza sisters, Claudia on keyboards and Alley on guitar and samples handling rhythm duties. And while I’m of the school of thought that live drummers are always better than samples, their live performance didn’t suffer much for it. Though their set was briefer than I’d have liked – just seven songs in 35 minutes – they still covered all the high points of Alpinisms, though they opted for straight reproduction of the record rather than reinterpretation. The Dehezas’ harmonies were tight and note-perfect, though a bit low in the mix, and Curtis’ non-stop guitar-riffing kept things from feeling too mechanical. And if 17-year old me may step in for just a moment and say to Curtis – dude, standing on stage and soloing whilst surrounded by beautiful girls? You are living the dream. And adult me is hoping that School Of Seven Bells strike out on their own tour in the new year, play a longer set and maybe mess around with the structure of things a bit.

M83 had just come through town in May so I’d expected that might have affected the turnout, and while the crowd was pretty thin early on it had filled up substantially by show time. I’d seen them back in 2005 at their Toronto debut at Lee’s Palace, and when anyone asks me about it the best word I could come up with the describe it is “ridiculous”. Read my review from that show for specifics. This time out, I was expecting equal levels of sonic grandeur and while I don’t think that those heights were reached, I think the show was actually better than that first one. Like that show, the M83 live experience was again a four-piece but this time the bassist had been traded for a second keyboardist/vocalist in Morgan Kibby, who is such an essential presence on Saturday=Youth. Anthony Gonzalez also spent more time on keys than guitar this time, lessening the need for taped backing tracks (of which there were still plenty, just less) and also mitigating the amount of fromage-ish rock star posing he could engage in.

Essentially, it seemed that they’d opted to sacrifice some spectacle for the benefit of the sound, and it was a wise trade-off. The band seemed much more engaged in the performance, and the extended square-wave instrumental explorations of Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts stood alongside the more pop-friendly confections of the last couple records. Not that those albums are short of instrumental excursions either, and proved that M83 has assembled a broad enough repertoire to shake off the “new My Bloody Valentine” tag that got applied when they first began making waves. Now you could just as accurately/inaccurately call them the “new New Order” or “new Cocteau Twins”. Or you could give up on that approach to lazy descriptors and simply accept that while they may wear their influences on their sleeve, M83 are now creating something that’s distinctly theirs.

Chart and Panic Manual have reviews of the show while The Chicago Tribune offers up an interview with Anthony Gonzalez.

Photos: M83, School Of Seven Bells @ The Opera House – November 20, 2008
MP3: School Of Seven Bells – “Connjur”
MP3: School Of Seven Bells – “Half Asleep”
MP3: School Of Seven Bells – “Chain”
MP3: School Of Seven Bells – “My Cabal” (Robin Guthrie mix)
Video: M83 – “Graveyard Girl”
Video: M83 – “Kim And Jessie”
Video: M83 – “Teen Agnst”
Video: M83 – “Run Into Flowers”
Video: M83 – “Don’t Save Us From The Flames”
Video: M83 – “America”
MySpace: M83
MySpace: School Of Seven Bells

Nick Cave is in the UK – how can you tell? The trail of interviews he leaves in his wake. The Sheffield Telegraph, The Scotsman and The Independent all have features.

The Telegraph reports that thirteen years after he disappeared, Richey Edwards of Manic Street Preachers has finally been officially declared, “presumed dead”. Edwards’ left-behind lyrics are being used as the basis of the next Manics record, due out some time in the Spring.

The Guardian sits down for an extended chat with Jarvis Cocker and his new beard. Great reading.

And if you don’t want to read, you can listen instead – there’s an audio interview with Chris Geddes and Stevie Jackson about the just-releaed BBC Sessions at BelleAndSebastian.com.

Christina HensleyWhen I was writing up the self-titled debut from Madison, Wisconsin’s Pale Young Gentlemen last year, I took the easy way out in name-checking some of the more obvious stylistic reference points (DeVotchKa, Decemberists, Beirut) but the band has to take equal responsibility in that – they made it easy. And to be fair, I still gave the record a thumbs up – just because it was a bit obvious, it didn’t make it any less of an accomplished and enjoyable debut.

But they’re not letting me get away with any such shortcuts with the follow-up, Black Forest (Tra La La), released last month. Though the same elements are at work, or even moreso in the case of their expanded string section, Black Forest has a much greater sense of purpose and determination about it. The debut seemed quite content to spend the evening at the cabaret getting debauched in grand fashion, not that there’s anything wrong with that, but while the sophomore effort starts off in that same setting with the grandiose “Coal/Ivory”, it then opts to step outside and go for a walk, exploring the dark nooks and crannies of existence.

As such, it’s a less immediate and raucous affair. On the first few listens, I was asking myself, “didn’t this band used to be fun?”, but repeated listens served the record well. Michael Reisenauer’s croon is as dramatic as ever and the orchestrated backdrops even richer than before, but the overall delivery is much more nuanced and less reliant on the big, sweeping gestures. That may not play as well to those in the cheap seats, but for those up front and paying attention, it’s much more rewarding.

Fingertips, The Bat Segundo Show and Culture Bully all have interviews with Reisenauer about the new record.

MP3: Pale Young Gentlemen – “Coal/Ivory”
MP3: Pale Young Gentlemen – “The Crook Of My Good Arm”
MySpace: Pale Young Gentlemen

Drowned In Sound solicits a mix tape from Emmy The Great. She also gives Clash a list of the meats currently comprising up her cultural stew. Her debut First Love is out in the UK on February 2.

Laura Marling is the subject of interviews at Clash and For Folk’s Sake. I feel compelled to mention that the LP versions of Alas, I Cannot Swim are worth seeking out, not only because it’s a nice heavy pressing but because it also comes with a bonus live CD that features the backing band that played with her on the recent “Fe Fie Fo Fum” North American tour, and as such, sounds absolutely splendid. I don’t know if there’s any other (legal) way to get Verses From The Union Chapel, but it’s worth having. And the players that largely comprised said band, Mumford & Sons, are also interviewed at For Folk’s Sake.

Colin Meloy describes the new Decemberists record, Hazards Of Love, to Rolling Stone. Key takeaways? Musical theatre, rock opera, more of the same.

Jonathan Meiburg annotates Rook, track by track, for Drowned In Sound.

The Broken West stop in for a session at Daytrotter. Stereogum asks frontman Ross Flournoy about his day job.

eye features M83 while Limewire, The Georgia Straight and NOW interview School Of Seven Bells. Both are in town tonight for a show at the Opera House.

Laundromatinee welcomes Margot & The Nuclear So And So’s to their studios for a video session.