Pick of the Week:

The Intelligence: Males

We fancy ourselves as pretty well-informed cats here at Sound Fix; we talk baseball, politics and rock like Rhodes scholars. And we like the Intelligence, and we all agree it's something you should have more of. Lars Finberg (also drummer of Seattle's A Frames) fronts this quartet, and on the group's seventh (!!) album, Males, he's distilled the...read more

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  The Black Angels: Phosphene Dream

  PRE-ORDER SPECIAL: SEE UPCOMING EVENTS (right). The Black Angels could've been content to merely remain devoted to the druggy, droney side of all things Velvet (Underground) and make...read more

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  Ra Ra Riot: The Orchard

  Young though they may be, Ra Ra Riot has been through a lot in its four-years-plus of existence (including the tragic drowning death of drummer John Pike), which could explain the un...read more

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  Cotton Jones: Tall Hours in the Glowstream

  Cotton Jones pulls out the best parts of recent indie faves Page France -- specifically the songwriting duo of Michael Nau and Whitney McGraw. Together here on their third full-lengt...read more

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  Mogwai: Special Moves

  This CD/DVD combo is a must for any self-respecting Mogwai fan -- because any self-respecting Mogwai fan knows well the fluid power and emotional grace of the Scottish band's live sh...read more

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  !!! : Strange Weather, Isn't It?

  If it wasn't broke before you kinda messed with it, go back to before you messed with it: !!!'s fourth album finds the dance-rock group going back to basics, putting its collective h...read more

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  S. Carey: All We Grow

  New genre coinage: indie-chamber-classical-folk-pop. (You heard it here first, and perhaps hopefully, last as well.) With All We Grow, Sean Carey, a member of Bon Iver's band and a s...read more

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  Matthew Dear: Black City

  The age-old border between techno chill and pop-analog warmth has been breached once and for all on Matthew Dear's new opus, Black City. Granted, Dear is hardly new to this; he's bee...read more

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  Magic Kids: Memphis

  Magic Kids' debut, Memphis (named for the band's hometown), features a wonderfully joyous and dreamy take on classic pop. Their sound bridges the stylistic gap between the teen i...read more

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  v/a: Next Stop, Soweto Vol.3: The Giants, Ministers & Makers: Jazz in South Africa 1963-1984

  While the focus of this compilation is ostensibly jazz, no particular love of jazz is required to appreciate this album, because many of the tracks could just as easily be labeled ...read more

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  Skream: Outside the Box

  Oliver Jones wasn't even close to being of legal drinking age when he first started popping up at stateside dubstep nights (such as NYC's then-underground, now well-known Dub War). T...read more

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  Fennesz Daniell Buck: Knoxville

  This trio meeting — recorded live at the Big Ears Festival in 2009 in Tennessee (guess which part) — proves that Christian Fennesz and his two cohorts, guitarist David Daniell (w...read more

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  Dean & Britta: 13 Most Beautiful: Songs for Andy Warhol's Screen Tests

  The recorded results of Dean & Britta's recent accompani-ations for Warhol's Screen Tests are no less hazily gorgeous than the concerts, or Warhol's stars for that matter. Long a...read more

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  v/a: Roots of OK Jazz: Congo Classics 1955-56

  The meaning of the title has little to do with the genre of jazz: This album compiles the early recordings of the eventual founders of Tout-Puissant OK Jazz, one of the two most ...read more

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  Walter Gibbons: Jungle Music

  As this comp's subtitle — Mixed with Love: Essential & Unreleased Remixes 1976-1986 — suggests, this is a collection of disco remixes, which is automatically going to be a fu...read more

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  Arcade Fire: The Suburbs

  And...they're back! Montreal's most popular export since poutine finally comes through with album No. 3, a meditation/dissertation on the particular state of ennui that plagues the W...read more

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  Wavves: King of the Beach

  Here's to growing up. Not that Wavves doesn't look the same from the outside: cheapie day-glo artwork featuring a mysti-cat smoking a ciggy under a pot leaf, the indie-mundanity of t...read more

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  Versus: On the Ones and Threes

  What started with a brief reunion tour — of the Philippines! — a couple of years ago has led to indie-rock's most welcome return this year. All of the halting, precious indie ban...read more

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  The Budos Band: III

  Perhaps the purest articulation of the Daptone aesthetic, this 12-strong Afro-soul instrumental group hits its best good foot yet on its third outing. The Budos Band's sound will nev...read more

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  Lloyd Miller & Heliocentrics: s/t

  The title of ethno-musicologist/multi-instrumentalist Dr. Lloyd Miller's collectors' holy grail LP Oriental Jazz (more name-dropped than actually heard until a couple of years ago wh...read more

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  v/a: Bloody War: Songs 1924-1939

  We've all seen those horrific video clips of soldiers unleashing hell in some eastern land to a soundtrack of aggro/lunkhead metal. Such testosteronic blurts seem to reflect the inhu...read more

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  Department of Eagles: Archive 2003-2006

  This mish-mash of song-fragments and experiments were put to tape in the years between this duo's first appearance (under the name Whitey on the Moon UK -- yes, we're all glad they h...read more

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  Lower Dens: Twin-Hand Movement

  Best reinvention of the year (so far) goes to Jana Hunter, who, as the first artist signed to Devendra Banhart's label, has been saddled with the "freak-folk" tag for the past half-d...read more

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  Stornoway: Beachcomber's Windowsill

  Lean, melodic and British as all get out (even if the brothers that make up the rhythm section are South African), Stornoway's debut demonstrates how indie-pop is an endlessly renewi...read more

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  El-P: Weareallgoingtoburninhell Megamixxx3

  Reminder: The music industry is in trouble, not the music. So while his Definitive Jux label folded up its tent (for the most part) in February, head Jukie El-P pushes on like a sold...read more

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  Best Coast: Crazy for You

  We've heard it all before -- sunny melodies and sharp-edged harmonies leavening lyrics about problems and heartache and things not working out and wanting to just escape from it all....read more

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  Donovan Quinn & the 13th Month: Your Wicked Man

  Those familiar with the Skygreen Leopards, the expansively mellow Cali psych-folk outfit, won't be surprised by the old-pair-of-jeans feel of Your Wicked Man, since Donovan Quinn is ...read more

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  Endless Boogie: Full House Head

  Oh, hell yeah. While NYC's raddest badasses took their sweet ol' time (11 years!) to get around to making Album No. 1, 2008's Focus Level, Endless Boogie's return trip took just two ...read more

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  The Books: The Way Out

  Now this is a welcome return — the Books with their first proper album in more than five years! The Way Out will sound familiar to old fans; like all of the duo's recorded work, th...read more

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  Menomena: Mines

  It's been three years since the last album by this wonderfully hard-to-pin-down Portland trio, and they've made the most of it: Mines outpaces anything Menomena has done before. Very...read more

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  Odmenn: s/t

  Finally, amid the glut of dubious psych-rock reissues, we get something truly worthwhile: the terrific lone album by the Icelandic trio Odmenn. Formed in 1966 by the Jóhannsson brot...read more

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  Max Richter: Infra

  Composer, producer, pianist, ring-tone pioneer: Max Richter has internalized more apps than your phone. Infra, his latest, is a collaboration with the choreographer Wayne McGreg...read more

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  John and Philipa Cooper: The Cooperville Times

  Another fine reissue from Shadoks (these guys know what they are doing). John and Philipa Cooper were a brother-sister team from South Africa, and this is their sole recording, origi...read more

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  To Rococo Rot: Speculation

  Few groups that you'd file under "electronic" have ever had the warmth, the presence, the sheer human-ness of the German trio To Rococo Rot, who've been proving it since the mid-90s....read more

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  Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse Present: Dark Night of the Soul

  At last -- what is possibly the ultimate in star-crossed albums gets its day. Sadly, two of its key players are no longer here to see it, including one of its lead stars, Mark "Spark...read more

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  M.I.A.: Maya

  Being the Western world's go-to future-pop artist must be stressful. M.I.A. responds to both that pressure as well as a world in perpetual crisis with Maya, a typically untamed colle...read more

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  School of Seven Bells: Disconnect from Desire

  Sure, both the Deheza twins and Benjamin Curtis, the trio who make up School of Seven Bells, had lots of experience before forming this group, but we can still marvel at how they've ...read more

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  v/a: Local Customs: Lone Star Lowlands

  We can always depend on quality when Chicago's Numero Group releases a compilation. Whether they are digging up long-lost soul from Columbus, Ohio, reggae from Belize, psych-folk fro...read more

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  Mystery Jets: Serotonin

  The nice thing about Mystery Jets’ type of well-executed Britpop is that it doesn’t have any of those qualms American rock bands often have about sounding too shiny. The gleaming...read more

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  The Love Language: Libraries

  The Love Language’s Stuart McLamb recorded his debut album of heartbroken lo-fidelity missives in a shed in his native North Carolina. It isn’t easy to follow that kind of origin...read more

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  Trentemøller: Into the Great Wide Yonder

  It's some trick these days to make techno sound like a new invention, but with Into the Great Wide Wonder, his second album, the very good Dane Trentemøller does just that: heaving ...read more

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  Woom: Muu's Way

  What a charming and unexpected thing this Woom album is! The duo formerly known as Fertile Crescent disappeared into a barn in Massachusetts last year and emerged with a new name and...read more

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  The Main Street Gospel: Love Will Have Her Revenge

  The Columbus music scene has a storied past and a respectable present, but it may never have produced a band that connects classic rock and druggy psychedelia like the Main Street Go...read more

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  Noveller: Desert Fires

  Noveller is the nom de guitar of Brooklynite Sarah Lipstate, whose last album, 2009's Red Rainbows, was a jarring, technicolor rampage through sculpted noise and crashing dynamics. F...read more

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  Wolf Parade: Expo 86

  It might sound weird to say that Wolf Parade is putting it all together on Expo 86, since the Montreal band has had so much well-earned indie-success in its seven years of existence....read more

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  Maps & Atlases: Perch Patchwork

  It'd be slightly misleading to call Chicago quartet Maps & Atlases "experimental pop," because on Perch Patchwork, the band's first full-length after several EPs, they are in fac...read more

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  Light Pollution: Apparitions

  The debut album by Chicago's Light Pollution officially takes flight at the 2:46 mark of opening track "Good Feelings," when a ripping guitar solo frees the song from the confines of...read more

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  Wild Nothing: Gemini

  The latest crop of hazy, likably half-engaged sounding pop records-- a good many of which have come through the Captured Tracks label that's responsible for this shimmering gem of a ...read more