Wolf Parade’s At Mount Zoomer is weird and nuanced and filled with bizarre energy. For the most part this works for them, but occasionally it works against.

At Mount Zoomer starts strong with the synth-accented 3/4 swirl of “Soldier’s Grin”, which builds to an impassioned release. The skipping piano march and hollowed-out vocals of “Call It A Ritual” continue to please. Zoomer also ends strong with the reigned-in 80s vibe of “Fine Young Cannibals” that would do Hall & Oates proud, and the grandiose epic that is “Kissing the Beehive”.

Though their quirkiness is part of their charm, Wolf Parade gets a bit too weird for the less-adventurous listener. Misplaced pop (”The Grey Estates”), a lengthly retro organ jam (”California Dreamer”), and an odd dance (”Bang Your Drum”) work together to make the middle of the album a little off-putting for the more sober among us.

This murky ground can be ignored, however, by the inclusion of “Language City” - a track that is earnest, stark at points, but still teeming with movement and warmth - and “An Animal in Your Care”, which begins relaxed and pretty but grows into a fierce declaration.

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At Mount Zoomer dropped 06/17/08.
Get downloads and more from Wolf Parade’s Sub Pop page.

On their self-titled LP, Fleet Foxes sound like the Beach Boys had they grown up in the middle of a forest instead of a sunny beach. Or like My Morning Jacket if MMJ was made up of classically-trained choir kids. Or The Shins on a granola high. Fleet Foxes paradoxically sound like everyone and no one at the same time.

The group’s main feature is their mastery of vocal harmony. It’s thick and echoing and cathedral-worthy and used more often than not, which makes lead singer Robin Pecknold’s voice that much more powerful and striking when heard on its own.

Several of Fleet Foxes’s songs evoke quasi-nebulous places, like the country road sunset of “Ragged Wood” and the dusty southwestern sprawl of “Your Protector”.

The non-verbal humming on “Heard Them Stirring” completes the overall tapestry of the piece (yes, Fleet Foxes make you use words like ‘tapestry’ - but without gagging) and the short piano addendum to “He Doesn’t Know Why” is downright beautiful.

Tracks like “Tiger Mountain Peasant Song” and “Meadowlarks” wouldn’t be out of place in your average New Age shop, but they translate well enough into the indie-folk world to keep people from smashing their heads into the wall from boredom and spite (it may be from the merciful lack of pan flutes and chimes).

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Fleet Foxes dropped 06/03/08.
For the MP3 and video of “White Winter Hymnal” click here.

Perspective and circumstance shouldn’t have a bearing on musical perception, but it does. The initial listen of Falcon’s self-titled EP warranted a good but by no means stand-up-and-shout review. However, after learning of the backstory to the Falcon legacy, things fall into place and what on first glance is run-of-the-mill shows itself as extraordinary.

A blind listen to the Falcon EP yielded notes that were generally favorable but had an overall want for growth and sophistication. There was promise in tracks such as “The Sandfighter”, which had instrumentals that strove to be epic a la Appleseed Cast & Explosions in the Sky but didn’t quite get there. “Birds and Mice” felt a little Snow Patrol-y, as did “Listen In” when it strayed from the rather interesting combination of darker claps, kick beats, and bass drops. Departing a little was the decidedly 80s feel of “Q of T”, featuring a smooth bass line and hooky chorus. Rounding out the EP was the early indie sound of “Bees”.

After taking it all in, I read Falcon’s bio to familiarize myself with them a bit. The story of their formation and what the EP really is struck me and gave me a new outlook on what I’d just heard. In short, all of Falcon’s songs were written between 1987 and 1988 by a fourteen-year-old prodigy (Jared Falcon) and recorded onto a Fischer-Price tape recorder prior to his death from spinal meningitis. Twenty years later, a couple of his former classmates and their friends (including members of Longwave) took Jared’s songs and gave them new life.

In a new context, the songs take on a new shade. They aren’t good because they were written by a fourteen-year-old - that’s not it. It’s the fact Jared Falcon was able to anticipate so many styles and sounds that work long after he’d written the last note. It’s also not that Falcon (the band) has zeroed-in on a moving story - it’s that they managed to take acoustic recordings two decades old and make them something palatable and relevant.

Jared Falcon wrote “You only feel right when you’re alone,” but in the case of the Falcon EP things feel right with his friends.

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Falcon EP drops 07/22/08.
Get more information about Falcon here.
Right-click to download “Q of T” and “The Sandfighter“.

In June, Girl Talk (aka Gregg Gillis) released Feed the Animals for download. The 53-minute LP is another frenetic mash-up drawing on a prolific scope of musical styles. Kicking off with the Spencer Davis Group’s “Gimme Some Lovin’”, one of the most recognizable song openings in recent history, and encompassing everything from classic rock and roll tunes (Roy Orbison, Question Mark and the Mysterians) to more recent flash-in-the-pans like Soulja Boy, Feed the Animals is guaranteed to put a smile on your face and to get you up and dancing.

Girl Talk and Gillis’s label, Illegal Art, have made the album available for download at whatever price you want to pay. The album is worth at least a few dollars, and for $10 you’ll get a hard copy of the disc once it’s released on September 23. To get your copy, go to Girl Talk’s MySpace page.

A short and sweet album gets a short and sweet review. This time around the subject of our scrutiny is the Bloomsbury EP from California’s Princeton.

Kicking off the EP is “The Waves” - its percussive clapping, thick instrumentation, and appealing lead vocals give off a distinctly beachy quality without being sun-bleached and dumbed-down. On the other side of Princeton’s influential coin is “Ms. Bentwich”, a track which pays homage to the British invasion and features a somehow dainty-yet-pounding harpsichord outro. “Eminent Victorians” fits in with the EP on the whole, but isn’t as noteworthy as “Leonard Woolf”, which makes itself memorable with interesting musical shifts and a backyard quality that has a hint of Ben Kweller about it. Bloomsbury offers a promising taste of more to come from this threesome.

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Bloomsbury EP dropped 07/08/08.
Get more on Princeton here.

Later this summer, Lesser Gonzalez Alvarez will release his first solo  effort, Why Is Bear Billowing?.

Opener “A Magic” is a thesis statement for the album - the acoustic guitar is relaxed and breezy and Alvarez serves up quirky and unexpected lyrics with his satiny voice. Though the album is fairly consistent (and consistently good), there are a few standouts and breakaways.

“All With Golden Locks” features fable-like lyrics, while the next track goes out a little farther on the limb with lines like “boy are you a sight for my pinecone eyes.” Said track (”Pinecone Eyes”) also has some lovely and slightly off-kilter picking at the end that is the musical equivalent of throwing your arms out and spinning til you fall in a sun-drenched field.

“Love for Longer” gets a little deeper in sound, but the timbre of “The Letter B” transports listeners to a bongo-filled beat coffeehouse. Another destination on Alvarez’s musical trip is the Spanish-tinged guitar and punchy claps of “Mostly A Friend”.

A magical romp, Why Is Bear Billowing? manages to be fantastic without becoming precious or silly. For fans of Mason Jennings or Fionn Regan, this is the perfect soundtrack for soaking up the summer sun.

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Why Is Bear Billowing? drops 08/19/08.
Click to download “Mostly A Friend”.
Check out Lesser Gonzalez Alvarez’s MySpace page here.

The latest release from Tall Firs, Too Old To Die Young, is a bit like an abandoned building on a vacant lot. Big space, room for potential, some points of interest, and a lot of semi-controlled chaos.

The three-piece leans toward melodic guitars and crashing cymbals at the album’s head, sounding like the Appleseed Cast would if they’d formed in the early nineties and had a less completely ridiculous version of the singer from the Crash Test Dummies fronting the band. Overall the first third of the album (and particularly the song “Hairdo”) is agreeable to the summer months and the open road.

The next third of the album is a little less structured. A large portion of “Warriors” is an instrumental jam that slowly reins in the chaos and comes back in surprisingly cleanly, while the slow-meld of “Good Intentions” is just a bit too nebulous. “Lookout” features paired guitar work, one in each ear, that proves to be an engaging listening experience.

The bluesy, All-American sound of “Loveless” leads off the album’s final third, sounding different from the rest of TOTDY but not out of place. “Secrets + Lies” serves up a low-key twang and a guy/girl duet that’s good enough to erase the near-comedic delivery on the previous track, “Hippies”.

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Too Old To Die Young dropped 03/18/08.
You can download “Hairdo” here, and find out more about Tall Firs here.

If I had to sum up David Walley’s 1998 release in one word, it would be ’snoozefest’. Teenage Nervous Breakdown: Music and Politics in the Post-Elvis Age is more of a personal nostalgic take on life than insightful look at how the rise of rock ‘n’ roll shaped the world.

Though the book contains research, most of Walley’s commentary is derived from his own experience and predilections. In and of itself, it’s not a bad thing, but would be better suited for a memoir. The heavy baby-boomer/ex-hippie/weren’t the fifties swell-slant makes it difficult for a younger audience to relate while simultaneously dating the perspective.

Also annoying is the clear fact that Walley never got over high school - he goes so far as to dedicate an entire chapter to explaining how society structures itself in much the same way high-schoolers do. While high school as life is a common metaphor, most of us get over the fact we were picked last in gym class and don’t fixate on it well into our forties. Hopefully for him he really showed the football team who’s boss by putting out this book.

While the content of the book did nothing to move me, matters were not helped by the format. The publishers picked a font that is hard to read (commas and periods are nearly indistinguishable from each other, and each letter has so many serifs it might as well be Middle Ages-era calligraphy), each paragraph has a large break in between (generally reserved for a separation of ideas), and there are several large block quotes per chapter (why not just read the other authors’ work?). This may be a nerdy conceit, but if a book is a laborious read regardless of content, it’s a problem.

If the title and proposed subject matter of the book intrigues you, I’d advise skipping Walley’s entry and going straight for Jon Savage’s Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture. It does an amazing job of tracing youth culture’s rise to prominence and is well-written on top of it. It’s a bit heavier but will save you the waste of time Teenage Nervous Breakdown turned out to be.

Motion City Soundtrack recently released their Acoustic EP exclusively on iTunes. Featuring five acoustic versions of songs from their LP Even If It Kills Me, it showcases the band’s songwriting abilities and gives a new gloss to the included tunes.

Utilizing acoustic guitar and piano in place of the buzzing electricity of the band’s usual high-voltage formation, MCS augments the sound with strings, bells, and handclaps.

Singles “It Had To Be You” and “Broken Heart” maintain the basic feeling and momentum of the album versions when stripped down. “Can’t Finish What You Started” sounds even better in its acoustic form than the original version. The piano at the end of “Point of Extinction” gives it a heart-tugging depth that compliments the song’s original incarnation well.

The standout on the EP by far is opener “Fell In Love Without You”. On Even If It Kills Me the song is a frenetic kiss-off, but here it’s a subdued reflection. The song includes the line “only time will tell if violins will swell in memory of what we used to call ‘in love’” and is cleverly accompanied by violins starting at the second iteration of the chorus, hinting that maybe the narrator and his subject did have something after all.

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Acoustic EP dropped on 05/06/08.
Get more info on Motion City Soundtrack at their official website.

Owen (aka Mike Kinsella) returned to Madison on May 3, 2008 to play to a cozy crowd at Club 770. Kinsella was in good spirits, happily conversing with the crowd and cracking jokes.

“Sometimes I write a song and it sounds like Sheryl Crow, and I think, ‘This is awful.’ Then I write a song and it sounds like ‘Chocolate Rain’…”

After finishing up a set of his own material, Kinsella decided to throw down a few Fugazi songs, a preview of his upcoming benefit show for CAASE on June 19 at Beat Kitchen in Chicago.

At this show we decided to use the video option on our super-cheap camera and captured Owen performing “The Ghost of What Should Have Been” for your viewing and listening pleasure. Of course, we’re idiots and filmed it portrait style, not realizing we couldn’t rotate it in editing. Oops. Just crane your neck to the left and you won’t even notice.