Hustling at SXSW

It’s taken a while, but Australians have finally latched onto the sport that is South By Southwest, which runs until the end of this week in Austin, Texas. In the media over the coming days, there’ll be commentary of which Australian bands are showcasing at which events; the bands who drew the biggest crowds, and rumours (or just fictionalised gossip) about the deals that have been brokered with touring agencies, management and labels. Within the Australian ‘music industry’, there’ll be talk of which international industry ‘career-makers’ showed their faces at Australian events and probably even more talk about which botoxed old bands’ gigs Australian attendees managed to blag their way into. (The top names on that hit-list this year seem to be Motörhead, playing tonight at 10.30pm, Hole at 1am on Friday and Swervedriver’s Adam Franklin and his band Bolts Of Melody on Saturday at 1am, though maybe that’s just my own personal fantasy week with the leather daddies, the tranny and the bear.)

Because of the realisation that a music conference can be turned into a competitive display of patriotism, SXSW now attracts coverage across mainstream media in Australia. It’s almost surprising that Eddie McGuire hasn’t been sent over this year to supply some ripping commentary on acts who haven’t left anything in the locker room. After all, the Scissor Sisters are headlining the Village Voice Media showcase.

This coverage, however, hasn’t transpired into much assistance in getting Australian bands over to Texas to represent our country. Aside from acts who can acquire government grants (the process of which, perhaps rightly, often has little to do with an act’s creative endeavours), there’s little monetary help for bands wishing to go sleep with international stars while high on crack. In other words, it’s nothing like the Olympics, the stars of which get help from income distribution from the Australian Olympic Committee, committed government grants and various corporate sponsorship and licensing deals (which Aussie SXSW showcases could certainly benefit from – there’s no doubt interest in televised coverage of the Aussie BBQ or of specific bands’ US showcase tours.)

All this means that, of the Australian acts who get officially invited (as acts must) to play at SXSW, there are still many who can’t attend. And if you’re wondering how much it costs for a band to go over and showcase in Austin, as well as the necessary East and West Coast showcase follow-ups, a known Aussie trio a couple of years ago borrowed upwards of $40,000 from their record label to do so, and they got something tangible out of the experience, which is more than can be said for many bands who make the trip.

Without this kind of funding, however, there are still largely unexplored platforms for Australian acts to get the dosh they need to get to the conference. One of these platforms is, in fact, the topic of discussion at one of the many music panels taking place at this year’s SXSW, titled Crowdfunding Music: Raising Money From Your Fans. The panel is being presented by a panel of folk well versed in digital marketing and licensing, perhaps the most interesting being Yancey Strickler, who co-founded the Brooklyn-based KickStarter site.

KickStarter allows people involved in all sorts of creative ventures to float their ideas on the site and ask for fans, friends and other interested parties to donate money to aid the venture’s development and execution. A monetary target must be set and when the donations reach that target, all those who’ve donated must pony up the dough. Another presenter on the panel is a songwriter named Allison Weiss, who through KickStarter successfully gained over $7,000 to record an EP. (Though, in my opinion, the greatest project asking for funding through the site is a film exploring the cultural impact of Calvin & Hobbes, which has already received $22,000 in donations.)

It’s a user-pays system, the concept of which many in the ‘music industry’ are pretty down-mouthed about in the current climate, but I think the general premise could have legs, especially when it comes to backing a band going overseas to represent the country. It would be like betting on sport, and who in our pie-groping nation doesn’t like that?

The pay-off could be exclusive content packages delivered by the band from their tour, progress updates, personalised messages or, as Santa Cruz band Camper Van Beethoven are doing at SXSW this year, getting a derby girl to continuously roller skate across the stage with placards bearing the name of the people or companies who donated money to get them there.

Adam Lambert VS Jobriath

Or: Lambert, The (Not So) Sheepish (Any More) Gay Lion

In the first week of August 2009, American Idol runner-up Adam Lambert was in the midst of an intensive tour of the States with the rest of the show’s finalists, appeasing the viewer’s of the talent quest and, hopefully, winning some over enough to anticipate his forthcoming November debut album. At that point, of course, Lambert wasn’t singing any of the originals that would appear on his own For Your Entertainment release. It was a set of hits taken from his time on the show, including the most popular, the Gary Jules arrangement of Tears For Fears’ Mad World, and a medley of songs by David Bowie – Life On Mars, Fame and Let’s Dance – an artist Lambert had identified as an influence on his own glam rock style.

Over his time on Idol, and seemingly with quite a push from Perez Hilton’s blog (who later commented with a snarky “took you long enough”), Lambert had gone from talented singer with a penchant for a rock falsetto and a dramatised arrangement of pop standards, to openly gay glam superstar. His ‘journey’, at least in the media, had been to ‘come out’, embrace his new position as a ‘gay singer’ (with public appearances with boyfriends and a Rolling Stone cover story) and turn the whole scenario into an all-singing, all-costumed spectacular that would overshadow any attempt to pigeonhole him into a lesser-selling niche market.

Come November and following a small ‘controversy’ in which Lambert simulated fellatio on a dancer in a performance at the American Music Awards, the press were declaring For Your Entertainment a relative success, comparable to many of the more successful releases by American Idol discoveries. The album has now gone gold, selling over half a million copies in the US, and was released last week in Australia.

In the first week of August a quarter of a century earlier, in 1983 (though the exact date, and sometimes month, changes source to source), the body of 37-year-old Bruce Campbell was found in the rooftop room of the Hotel Chelsea. Campbell had died alone of AIDS-related causes, but not a decade earlier, at the same age as Lambert, he was being spruiked as the next major pop star in the United States as Jobriath, the American brand of Bowie at a time when glam rock was the next musical phenomenon to sweep the western world’s largest market.

Jobriath was an openly gay former hustler and theatre performer who, under the wing of ambitious manager Jerry Brandt, was sold to Elektra Records, his debut album backed with an expensive marketing campaign that included a 40-foot billboard in New York City’s Times Square. Where Bowie’s – and others’, including Lou Reed’s – image at the time had a lot to do with the veiling of gender and sexuality to create an otherworldly creature, an unknown quantity, Jobriath’s homosexuality was slathered onto his marketing like shock-value icing, drawing snide comments from press and many audiences, and the widespread observation, later, that no one was ready for such a thing.

It’s difficult to find any information about the sales of the record, which received generally good reviews, though much can be assumed by the fact that a follow-up, with far less press, was delivered six months later and a tour once planned as a big-budget extravanganza (complete with ejaculating Empire State Building and Jobriath dressed as Marlene Dietrich) was cancelled. Jobriath wasn’t heard from again until Morrissey began championing him and the two albums were re-released on CD last decade.

Now, Jobriath is widely known as the first completely ‘out’ rock star. Adam Lambert is by no means the second, though there are parallels to Jobriath’s story that haven’t been drawn by any other, and not just his choice of genre from which to launch his songs. Lambert was signed and publicised with his sexuality on the table, not up for negotiation, through a campaign not aiming him at any kind of ‘art’ crowd, as others in the past have been (even Scissor Sisters in the States). Without that ‘outsider’ marketing or performance angle, Lambert has, so far, been open to record and perform as any majorly-backed pop singers do, using sex, not social politics, to add a seductive quality to otherwise catchy (and pretty dreary, in Lambert’s case) dance pop.

It’s too early to see if his sexuality has any real impact on his career (and it may be too intangible a value to quantify anyway), but already Lambert is retelling the fate of Jobriath. And it only took a quarter of a decade.

Down Sounds: March 2010

Last month The Breakdown began a new tradition for the year in which, every four weeks, I’ll take a look at some of the more interesting or appealing releases or band ‘discoveries’ of the previous weeks. Not inappropriate this month considering the ongoing fight to preserve venues across our Footloose-hating land (and thanks to Brian Nankervis for doing his best Kevin Bacon last week at the Melbourne SLAM Rally).

To an act whose appearances here are always slightly shrouded in mystery thanks to his spontaneous approach to touring (and therefore won’t get the attention it deserves elsewhere in music press), this week Oakland, California’s one-man posi glitch-rap party Hawnay Troof will play headline shows in Sydney and Melbourne. Vice Cooler – HT’s protagonist – has just put out a new album through American label Retard Disco, titled Daggers At The Moon, which he’ll hopefully be bringing a few copies of to sell at the shows, but there’s also a free EP, Shed Skin, to download as of the weekend on his website. The EP features one unreleased track plus remixes by Leg Lifters, underrated-in-Aus duo from the Gold Coast The Death Set vs Zap! Pow! Die!, No Age and Kid606.

New York’s indie True Panther Sounds label (owned as of late last year by Matador) has put its name to three 12” releases, which will be launched simultaneously this week in the basement of Brooklyn’s Monster Island Recordings studio. Tanlines, a duo who make the kind of parading, tropical dance music that might occur if the percussionists taking part in Carnivale were given electronic snares, will be launching Settings. Sierra Leone via Philadelphia’s Janka Nabay will be launching Bubu King, his latest take on his homeland’s “bubu music” in which multiple bamboo pipes are used to whip up a rhythmic whirlwind. And Brooklyn’s Lemonade, who have been championed in these parts before, will be launching Pure Moods, an EP of their sample-heavy, tinkering, looping, building, atmospheric and generally awesome sunset pop. All three 12”s can be purchased as a bundle from the Matador Records store online.

The other week I picked up a little two-track CD from Sydney’s Southern Comfort, the core duo of which is made up of Angela Bermuda and Harriet Hudson, members of reason-number-836-why-Sydney’s-hype-machine-seems-to-be-a-bit-broken Circle Pit (the reason being they aren’t better known in other cities). Anyway, Southern Comfort are something of a lo-fi revelation (an oxymoron?): kind of old rock’n’roll structuring played with heavy distortion and enacted vocally with angelic but flippant harmonies. Good stuff. The duo will have a release out through the always excellent RIP Society Records this year, which also just put out the nicely power-punk new 7” from Sydney’s Bed Wettin’ Bad Boys, who Southern Comfort just toured with.

Heading out to launch the CD version of their Landlord album this month are Brisbane’s Scul Hazzards, who’ve changed a lot since they started years ago as the project of one of Brisbane’s favourite bass-playing sons, Lachlan Anderson, who then left to join and tour with Die! Die! Die!. These days, the Hazzards are more for those who like their dirty noise-rock on the mathy side, or those who like their math-rock as wide and brown as the shirts Steve Albini gets around in. Which is really just to say that they bring on the pug-face – always a good time.

On the more depressing side of things – and summer and summer-loving are over, so sure – two artists from opposite sides of the North American expanse have releases out in coming weeks that I’ve had the chance to hear early. Truly, if you’re in the mood to cry into your nangs, don’t miss Texan heart-wrench Micah P Hinson’s new covers album, All Dressed Up And Smelling Of Strangers (POD/Inertia, 12 March), which sees him taking on Roy Orbison, Emmy The Great, Bob Dylan and others. Then there’s Montreal’s The Besnard Lakes, who build on their affectingly haunted fuzzy pop with The Besnard Lakes Are The Roaring Night on 13 March (Jagjaguwar/Inertia).

Finally, if you like your indie doodles sprawling and big on hi-hat, check out Melbourne’s promising Hollow Everdaze, who’ve started picking up a good support or two and could probably use a few suggestions for a decent band name.

Roller dozy: Ellen Page lied to me

As soon as we drove into the car park we were buoyed by the sight the giant shed with large blue ‘70s font curling across it, reading “Skate Centre”. It had been a decision made on the third day of a somewhat cheeky work-wag week to catch up with old friends out of town, even though I don’t actually think anyone needs an excuse to ditch life for a while and escape into the long grass. We’d been lying around, admittedly slightly hung over, talking about the film Whip It! and trading childhood skating stories (yes, back then we all got around on wheels instead of crack), and before we knew it we were in a bitumen lot that struck a remarkable resemblance to the one in which Ellen Page gets her first hit of roller derby adrenalin. This one, however, was near empty and we were far too craggy and dumbed by the previous night’s beer intake to make any charmingly sarcastic repartee or be mistaken for spirited 17-year-olds.

The group of girls who walked into the centre ahead of us weren’t, however. There were five of them, all wearing long, red-and-black-striped socks with pig-tails and tank tops emblazoned with “Speed Demonic” and “Skate Skank”, kicking each other in the heels and generally ‘talking trash’. We were, we thought, in the presence of real-life out-of-town derby chicks and, inspired by the role-play, hired roller skates rather than the blades we’d been brought up on. (That said, the last time I wore blades involved speeding down my steep childhood street towards a busy intersection and having to purposely fall over onto a gravel driveway before reaching the bottom, tearing strips out of my arms and legs in the process and not really winning any points in the ‘90s battle for skate cred.)

Inside, too, the rink was just like the nostalgia-smacked film, barely touched since the ‘70s, right down to the $2 skate hire and cardboard buckets of hot chips being served over the canteen counter. There was even an old fat dude perched high up in a booth, commentating on those making loops around the cement floor in the centre of the room, with well-worn catchphrases like, “That was a doozy!” and, “She’s done this before!” suavely bellowed just like the guy from The Price Is Right. In fact, it might have been the guy from The Price Is Right.

The music was another matter. A chart-thieving mix of new American rap (not the good kind) and bland ‘atmospheric’ dance pop, it wasn’t exactly the glam rock or riot grrrl fantasy we’d dreamed up back on the couch. Bikini Kill had been replaced with Iyaz, and Kiss with Stan Walker.

The scene once we entered the rink was even more depressing. The derby girls, it turned out, weren’t derby girls at all but hopeless losers like us who could barely put one wheel-bottomed foot in front of the other. Together – us and them – we were the unskilled tourists amongst a crowd of families and well-underage kids who were skating, mostly on blades, like they came to the rink every weekend, gliding gracefully around in practical, loose-fitted clothing and smiling and waving as they passed each other. There wasn’t a side-swipe, beer, ripped jean or cuss word for miles. It was like they hadn’t even heard of Whip It!.

We joined the parading sober people and, after some time, the music turned towards more Aus-centric radio-rock fare; to a coastal anthem by The Sundance Kids, the wistfully grungy new single from British India, a bit of Gyroscope and even – I think, though I might have been deluded by all the bright surf-brand t-shirts – a song by winsome Brisbane duo Ellington. It wasn’t the riot we were hoping for, but rolling along in a wholesome daze, the tracklist seemed oddly fitting; catchy, sincere and somewhat heartening local band-rock soundtracking an innocence that was, here, obviously enacted weekend after weekend in this weird time-machine of a place.

It was a different kind of role-play I almost wished I could take part in more often. That is, until the lights went down, the disco balls up and Owl City’s Fireflies came on.

Is Gerard Way getting into Palin's pants?

It was going to be a preview of the future of ‘mainstream’ rock for those with any desire to witness such a thing. Between the pop punk reformists and revivalists, the nuance-heavy metallers, and steez-clinging oldies like Faith No More and Placebo, the Soundwave festival tour, which begins its national run this weekend, was going to give us a glimpse of what we can expect to see from arena rockers and would-be arena rockers in the coming years. But the one band name that was going to make that happen is now missing from the set times: My Chemical Romance.

The New Jersey band recently announced that their fourth album, due sometime this year, is to turn on the thinking that made them bare their conceptual dreams like a brown-eye and arrange them like drunken musical nudie runs, thus turning on the proverbial light for other bands to prove how giant their own rock-swords were. The Used proved they had a pretty sizeable one; 30 Seconds To Mars probably shouldn’t have revealed theirs. Arena rock’s latest saviours (whether we needed one or not is questionable, though I’ve always had a ‘soft spot’ for MCR) have gone as far as they can, MCR’s Gerard Way has been espousing to the press; Muse having the final word on pompous-arse-being with The Resistance means the only way for their peers to go is in the opposite direction: towards rougher, straighter garage rock sounds.

In a cover story in the NME a couple of weeks back, Way told that the band’s yet untitled fourth record would be a “punk” album. “I think it plugs into the fact that maybe people right now just simply want to have a good time, you know? Maybe they just want to feel free. Maybe they don’t want to rebel,” he said.

And so “punk” would be the gateway to that un-thinking, with new songs like Death Before Disco (viewable in pieces as live clips on YouTube) following the punk’d-up cover of Bob Dylan’s Desolation Row they recorded for Zack Snyder’s Watchmen film adaptation in ‘09. Death Before Disco’s lyrics sum up the ideology: “This ain’t a party!/Get off the dancefloor!/You wanna get down!/I want a gang war!”

While we won’t get to see this new direction onstage this month, and thus won’t get to have an honest debate about how many world-known bands have moved from pop rock towards punk rather than the other way around (can you think of any?), all this talk of leaving once rebellious emotional empathy/sympathy in the past is echoing another happening: that of the “Tea Party” movement, led by the biggest un-thinker of them all, Sarah Palin. (When typing that, I accidentally just wrote ‘of the mall’ instead of ‘of them all’ – and come to think of it, Palin probably wouldn’t be able to see the sail boat, either.)

Palin, working up to her position as a Fox News political analyst (gonna get some balanced analysis there), has been on the media trail riling up conservatives for the upcoming midterm elections for congress and, further ahead, the 2012 presidential campaign. By and large, Palin’s rhetoric has centred on deriding Barack Obama for being educated and emotional, and championed brash action led by ‘the people’, just as the original ‘Boston Tea Party’ did in 1773, when they boarded three ships and dumped the cargo of British-taxed tea that Boston officials had refused to send back to Britain in protest of paying a tax not decided by their own elected representatives.

The “Tea Party” is an anti-party movement with, seemingly, few plans other than to overthrow a government that hasn’t solved their financial problems or appeased their desire for xenophobic attacks. “We need a Commander-In-Chief, not a professor of law,” Palin told a Tea Party convention earlier this month. What she could have said instead was, “Get off the dancefloor! I want a gang war!”

So, where political conservatism is being cloaked in mutiny, could the mutinous, anti-pomp sounds of the newest incarnation of ‘punk’ be the musical equivalent; the soundtrack to rebellion rebellion? Or is it really just sword-swiping dudes zipping their flies back up? Either way, arena rock (and any last attempts at ‘emo’ labelling, though that’s another matter) is again coming to an end and we’ll all just have to get used to looking at Gerard Way with his, and our, pants on.

Is Stephin Merritt a good folk?

Oh, there it is: that bulbous pretension delivered with naïve sincerity. That deep, sexy voice and cynical, sadistic sense of humour; the lonely laments and elated realisations. The smack-me-then-hug-me-ness of it all. It must be a new Magnetic Fields album. Stephin Merritt and his band delivered the third of their trio of ‘concept’ albums on, perhaps fittingly considering all those descriptors, Invasion/Survival/Australia Day; an album titled Realism (Nonesuch) to counter 2008’s Distortion album of washy electric guitars.

What’s interesting about that title is that the record is also what Merritt has described as his “folk album”, utilising primarily acoustic instruments drawn from various cultural traditions (accordion, sitar, banjo, flugelhorn) and minor percussion (well, minor compared to a drum kit, such as the cajon). Apparently, Merritt was originally to name the these last two albums, intended as a pair following his conceptually “soft rock” record i, ‘True’ and ‘False’, but couldn’t decide which label fitted which album. The titles Distortion and Realism were decided on instead, and “it is what it is”, Merritt recently said in an interview with Canada’s Dose.ca website.

But what is it? If Merritt’s ‘Realism’ is relating to the philosophical theory of Direct Realism – the idea that the world is as we see it, as opposed to all that subjective perception or mind-dependent perception crap (just kidding) – we’re to understand that ‘folk music’ is the stuff of what-we-hear-is-what-is-really-happening. In essence, it is still the ‘truth’. Merritt, however, is the antithesis of almost everything a ‘folk’ musician is known to be – a self-absorbed but ultimately innocent cynic who, even on Realism, hardly ascribes to any kind of ‘traditional’ method of songwriting. Yet, in many ways, he’s built a following for being what ‘folk musicians’ are also known to be: a ‘truth-teller’; a modern-day narrator of modern-day struggles. So is his version of ‘folk music’ the ‘truth’?

Fionn Regan, on the other hand, is the archetype of ‘folk musician’. His 2006 debut album of fingerpicked acoustic songs was connected in no broken line to the kind of unionist, mid-20th century folk songs of Pete Seeger and Woodie Guthrie – The End Of History. On that record, his songs were so intrinsically linked to the connectivity of humanity and to the laws of the land you almost expected him to drop the word “folk” into his stage banter when addressing the audience.

Regan’s second album, Shadow Of An Empire (Heavenly/Speak N Spell) is out at the start of March and takes up where ‘folk music’ became ‘folk rock’, a plugged-in, lyrically political album of nuanced foot-stompers (and a truly, truly, pants-droppingly remarkable one, it should be said) with song titles such as Protection Racket and Genocide Matinee. He wrote it while touring, “seeing the world, the bone structure, the pulp”. Though his voice is a new one in many regards, Regan is, in 2010, a ‘traditionalist’; a modern-day narrator of, perhaps, an old idea of what it means to be ‘the people’.

Then there’s Adam Green, whose Minor Love (Rough Trade/Remote Control) album was released at the beginning of January and who initially gained notoriety as the face of early-2000s ‘anti-folk’ in The Moldy Peaches. In that group, Green turned ‘traditional’, sincere, acoustic ‘folk song’ forms on their heads with ludicrous, arrogant and irreverent lyrics – the distorted version of Merritt’s ‘truth’. Green has gone on to do much the same with his solo career, largely swapping ‘folk’ for ‘cabaret’, but in 2007 he had one of the biggest ‘folk’-related hits of recent times with The Moldy Peaches’ Anyone Else But You from the Juno soundtrack – the clip reaching five million hits on YouTube alone – a song hardly ‘anti’ in its form or, for all the band’s genre-pegging, its lyrical content. It is, in the end, a song ‘of the people’, taken in by more people than any of Merritt’s or Regan’s songs.

So what is the ‘truth’ of ‘folk music’ in 2010? And is there even one? Maybe the answer to that depends on which side your philosophical bread is buttered, or whether you’re willing to admit to liking ‘folk music’ in the first place.

Down Sounds: January 2010

This year, I’m going to try something new with The Breakdown and dedicate one column a month to some of the more decent or interesting releases of the previous four weeks, or just stuff I’ve been led to online or stuff people are talking about elsewhere. That way I don’t have to try to cram them down the bottom of each week’s column and come up with some ludicrous tie-in to that particular week’s rant, like, for instance, working a plug for Melbourne’s excellent Absolute Boys into a column about lap swimming.

In the spirit of that, let’s start locally. Brisbane’s Kitchen’s Floor (pictured) last year released their debut album of thick, thorny no wave, Lonelieness Is A Dirty Mattress, and at the beginning of January stuck a cut-together live clip of a new track up on their MySpace, the song from which – Regrets – will be on a 7” coming out on RIP Society Records in February. It’s a minute-and-a-half surge of amp noise moved up and down by a melodic chant and interspersed with jarring guitar-string rubs.

Exo Records have released a seven-track 10” from Melbourne squealers Teen Archer, who excel in brash, primitive but maxed out garage punk. If you’re looking the band up online, there’s not a whole lot of info or sounds out there, but they’ve been kicking around since October 2008 and have played shows with Useless Children, Children Collide and all the bands who regressed into childhood (albeit a drunken one) at Flip Out.

Then there’s Crumbs, the solo project for Agents Of Abhorrence drummer and Brain Children (and Catcall) beat guy Max Kohane. Brain Children’s EP was one of the finest Australian dance releases of 2009, a lo-fi kosmische disco blend, and Crumbs steps even further into the hypnotic beats with glitch and snippy trip-hop effects. You can download it free from his Bandcamp.

LA and Brooklyn seem to have some kind of surf pop rock exchange program going on at the moment, and two bands who are getting some attention are LA’s Dum Dum Girls and Brooklyn’s Frankie & The Outs, both all-girl bands making gritty yet tropical, ‘60s-bent guitar pop. Dum Dum Girls have already signed to Sup Pop (and have a song titled Catholicked, so they gotta be good, right?), while Frankie Rose and her band are on Slumberland and have shows with Kurt Vile and The Primitives and spots at SXSW coming up.

This week sees Midlake’s new album of beardy folk that takes on more traditional forms (though not in a bad-sad ‘trad’ way), The Courage Of Others, out here through Speak N Spell, wrapping up a month that’s been largely about doped up, minimal folk pop on the bands-making-albums-that-are-getting-blog/column/people-inches front. Two teenaged Swedish girls who go by First Aid Kit released their debut album through Wichita Recordings in the UK to general gasping at their precociousness (but when will the media not gasp at young people doing absolutely anything?) and it is a pretty startlingly wonderful album – there’s got to be something special there that makes pretty basic recordings of two girls singing with guitars sound this heartbreaking and inspiring.

Basia Bulat’s oscillating warble does its thing over another album, out last week through Rough Trade/Shock, while Mistletone gave us Beach House’s new Teen Dream record, an album so sensitive and pleasurable it might well be an undiscovered erogenous zone. (And I realise sexualising an album titled Teen Dream is a bit wrong, but hey, I didn’t do this to society, I’m just going with it – gasp.) While we’re here, this Friday sees the release through Mistletone of an album by South Carolina 23-year-old Toro Y Moi, titled Causers Of This, a wash of bright psychedelic harmonies and keys with hip hop beats and enough bassline grooves to turn him into next summer’s most anticipated live experience.

But if you’re looking for something more on the gothic-glitch-dance side of things, check out We Are Like The Spider from Missouri, who I may or may not have found by looking at the Facebook groups of some New York hipster who was in a photo with Ssion and Jonny Makeup. Shut up, it was worth the shame.