By Landon Moblad

THE WALKMEN
Lisbon
(Fat Possum)

You & Me, the Walkmen’s excellent 2008 album, showcased how strong the band could be while working within a mellower, more plaintive framework. Not that they’d ever been entirely void of it before, but that album’s wistful horns and lyrics dripped with melancholy that hardly let up. Early publicity about its follow-up, Lisbon, hinted at the group’s desire to revisit some of the more raucous material they toyed with on earlier albums and then fully succumbed to on 2006’s track-by-track cover of the Harry Nilsson/John Lennon album, Pussycats. Read more »

By Landon Moblad

THE BOOKS
The Way Out
(Temporary Residence)

During the far too long half-decade wait between albums, it became easy to wonder if maybe Nick Zammuto and Paul de Jong, together known as The Books, had lost some of their creative juices. Luckily, one listen to The Way Out proves the wait was well worth it. If anything, this is an album so meticulously thought out and crafted that the two years (they officialy began recording in 2008) it took to create makes complete sense. It’s clear now that it wasn’t a lack of ideas, but rather a surplus of them to work through that caused the delay. And the final product, 15 tracks spread over nearly 55 minutes, is some of the finest work of their career. Read more »

By Willy Staley

Meeting people you know only from the Internet is a bizarre experience. I share my tedious thoughts with people on Twitter all day, and I read theirs, and yet I don't know the first thing about them as a person, and they know nothing about me. There are precious few opportunities to actually meet these people, and I like it that way. Lil B the Based God's sold-out late July show at Santos Party House in Lower Manhattan would not be one of those nights. Lil B without the Internet is inconceivable. In some ways, he is Internet hip-hop culture personified, embodying both its great potential, and its childish shortcomings. A lot of Internet people would be in attendance, I learned, from both my Tumblr and Twitter feeds. Read more »

By Amber Schadewald and Sam Stander

TAKE ONE "Have you seen her before?" a spirited woman asked a random couple in the front row at Oakland's Fox theater Monday night, just before the lights began to dim. "She's a fucking angel." And it's hard to disagree. California's own folk-harp-composing-wonder Joanna Newsom is a beautiful, beautiful being who produced a perfectly impressive evening with song after long song of feather-light melodies. 

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