Pine Hill Haints

Where some alt/country bands try to sing and pick like their forefathers so desperately that you can smell their formal musical training a mile away, you get a sense that the Pine Hill Haints (it’s an arcane Southern way to say “haunts” – I looked it up) get their legitimacy not from aping some Smithsonian Folkways compilation or other but from, well, from just making sweet Appalachian porch music. The Alabama skater friends thread together the romance, anxiety, religion, determination, and abandon that makes the American South such an enigma – and such a fertile breeding ground for a band that inadvertently keeps the old traditions alive while creating one all of their own.

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Mt. Egypt

There isn’t much sunshine in titles of Mt. Egypt’s plaintive ballads, and there isn’t much sunshine in New York City today, so the pairing is one that fits quite nicely. According to his bio, Travis Graves is “homeless in California,” which begs one of those chicken-or-the-egg questions of whether he’s homeless because he’s an artist or he’s an artist because he’s homeless. The longing in Graves’ vocals is in the great recent tradition of such wounded souls at Will Oldham, Mark Kozelek and Eef Barzelay, and his fragile guitar paints a wistful picture, especially on the lower-fi offerings here. But lest you spin off to something more cheerful to get your weekend going, Graves isn’t all melancholy. His is the sound of transition — that moment when despair gives way to renewal. It’s the perfect soundtrack to the changing of the leaves, because autumn is finally here, even if you’re homeless in California.

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Valley Lodge

You heard it here first: The next old-ass band to be hailed better-late-than-never as influential pop geniuses is Electric Light Orchestra — good ol’ ELO. I’ve heard them so many times in commercials and elsewhere lately that I’m convinced an unseen cosmic force is watching me and that the next time I order Chinese food it’ll be Jeff Lynne holding the bag and telling me to read my fortune cookie very carefully. Perhaps it’s even Lynne who subliminally led me to Valley Lodge (well, Lynne and the 3hive suggestion box), who, despite not sounding much like ELO at all, share the infectious habit of overdubbed high-tenor harmonies with the erstwhile prog-pop gods. There are also guitar hooks, a bass of a thousand rhythms, and mixed acoustic and electric melodies to keep you right in time. These are men who know how to craft a slightly emo, slightly retro pop song – and why shouldn’t they when their members’ list of former and current projects include Walt Mink, Sense Field, Satanicide, and Uptown Sinclair? “All of My Lovin” is one of those tracks that instantly sounds like you’ve been bouncing to it all of your life. And there are a dozen more little beauties on the album. Even the bios on their website are more fun than a barrel of domesticated monkeys. But, if Valley Lodge ever hope to be as mega-influential as ELO, they really need to work on their album covers. The birds are nice, guys, but the Technicolor ELO spaceship kicks ass. You know it’s true.

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The Morning After Girls

When I lived in San Francisco, I worked for a company whose founders were from Melbourne, a city they often called “Australia’s San Francisco” for its artistic community and hipster quotient. It makes sense, then, that the Morning After Girls, whose delicious guitar psychedelia sounds perfect on a podcast next to San Fran’s Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, would hail from Melbourne. They are too cool for school, no doubt, but with the Cobain-esque wail of “High Skies” and the Ride-esque riffs of “Straight Thru You,” they make school seem way less than cool anyway.

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Matisyahu

A Hasidic reggae sensation. It sounds like a sitcom setup that inevitably ends in “Now I’ve really seen it all!” And I’ll admit that when I saw Matisyahu for the first time, the gangly visage in a black suit and hat and traditional beard, combined with a voice perfectly trained for staccato wordplay, was as disorienting as Michael Bolton bustin’ out with a rhyme that would make Jay-Z blush. Yet despite being the last guy you’d expect to find himself in a waka-waka rhythm, Matisyahu comes legit with lyrics often steeped in religious imagery which, like Bob Marley’s Rastafarianism or even Bono’s Catholicism, never cross over into dogma. It’s in those lyrics that Matisyahu’s conceit comes into focus: Zion, Babylon, salvation, temples, princes and kings — whether Jamaica or Jerusalem, reggae at its core is rebel music for true believers. Matisyahu is true, and he’s bound to make some new believers of his own.

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The Red Thread

There’s a yearning for something else in The Red Thread’s pretty, simple chords that give you a wistful sense that something is ending and another thing is beginning. Not anything serious, just something that was bound to change, like the heat of summer into the crisp melancholy of fall. Maybe it’s more ideal for the Tuesday coming up than for right now with the last long weekend of summer in front of you, but maybe you can give autumn a little peek and realize that you’ve been looking forward to it for a while.

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Lewis Taylor

Apologies in advance: Today’s post may be yesterday’s news and I may just be late to the Lewis Taylor party. Sorry, it’s just a bit of a shock to find something so great that I overlooked for so long. But enough about this blogger’s insecurities. Lewis Taylor is a British soul singer/multi-instrumentalist with a voice like warm butterscotch and an ear for music like no soul you’ve ever heard. Before you conjure images of Joss Stone or Jamiroquai, rest assured that Lewis Taylor is for real – he’s not simply playing his parents’ vinyl collection, he’s taking soul to places it hasn’t been before. But, it doesn’t hurt that he hits with velvet gloves like Marvin Gaye and arranges with the kaleidoscope mind of Prince. (He also goes his own way under the radar like the inimitable Joe Henry – not a soul man, but a darn fine musician you should seek out.) As you browse through these highlights, you’ll hear some guitar and crooning that could be Ben Harper on a rainy day, some space-jazz this side of Miles Davis fusion, and even a few moments that are more electronically out there (Radiohead’s name pops up often in other people’s Taylor descriptions, and Kruder + Dorfmeister offer a remix here). Or, you’ll hear all of the above in the same track. And, if you haven’t already fallen, you’ll love it all.

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Levy

Manhattan’s Lower East Side probably doesn’t smell as good as Manchester’s hipper hipster enclaves — or anywhere else, for that matter — but the sounds coming out of the gentrified tenements these days are enough to make you forget about that whole art-rock-as-next-big-thing debacle. Case in point: Levy, named for its post-modern crooner of a lead singer, paints NYC in an appealing shade of Mancunian gray, waxing chippy to melancholy on relationships that weren’t built to last. As with that one-named icon who helped put Manchester on the map, Levy sounds best when Matt Siskin’s guitar propels the songs into the atmosphere. Put on your iPod and let Levy bounce around inside your head for a while.

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The Movies

Something about the way The Movies play a fast beat real slow-like just gets the “they sound like” comparative juices flowing. The guitar chimes and backbeat are what The Promise Ring would sound like if you played their 45s at 33 and a third. Their wistful vocals are what the Tindersticks would sound like if they were from the Midwest. Their wail-and-repeat lyrics are a bit like The Fall without the dissonance, or like Fugazi fronted by Jonathan Richman. And yet, the newest of these tracks, “Rock in the Slingshot,” picks ups the pace ever-so-slightly – “they sound like” Gang of Four in the chill-out room.

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