Cloudspeakers

Athens, Georgia, band the Whigs build arena-size tunes out of some very unarena influences — including the Replacements, Pixies, My Morning Jacket and Spoon. The band's third disc is the sharpest d... Read more

These Chicago gloom punks have long mixed gory lyrics and bright pop melodies, making evil seem like a day at the beach. Their 2008 major-label bid, Agony & Irony, got bogged down in power-ballad o... Read more

Pretty much every song on this prog-pop band's sixth disc evokes moodiness via some sort of weather, event, or technological-flux metaphor. It's a suitable theme for elegantly mutable yet hummably ... Read more

In 2008, this Broken Social Scenester released a pleasant, mid-'70s singer-songwriter record, like Jackson Browne's Late for the Sky by way of Wilco, only softer. Here, he works the '70s nexus betw... Read more

Damon Albarn claims the concept for the third Gorillaz album came to him while watching people and animals forage through a Malian garbage dump. Indeed, most every one of these lazy, hazy burbling ... Read more

Shout Out Louds are proud indie-rock neocons: 2007's Our Ill Wills ripped a melody from the Cure, a song title from the Smiths and vocal moves from Bright Eyes. The third album from the Stockholm q... Read more

Free Energy have clearly watched Dazed and Confused many times. The Philly quintet futz with Seventies rock like gearheads restoring an old El Camino. Singer Paul Sprangers and guitarist Scott Well... Read more

The best song on this U.K. electro-pop group's 2008 disc Made in the Dark was an ode to disco abandon called "Ready for the Floor." The best one here is a marriage proposal called "One Life Stand."... Read more

These San Diego garage rockers got some heat for originally calling themselves the Muslims, but such risky judgment does not extend to their taste in used noise. The Soft Pack are revivalists who k... Read more

Florida's Surfer Blood idealize Nineties alternative rock the way Seventies punks idealized Fifties rock & roll: as a tangible past just distant enough for them to misremember in awesome new ways. ... Read more