About Upcoming Artists

Ra Ra Riot

Formed at Syracuse University in January 2006, Ra Ra Riot is an amorphous blob (read as: band) that consists of seven highly dedicated individuals, each bringing her/his own experiences as both people and musicians to the metaphorical table. Their most recent indie pop recording is The Rhumb Line on Barsuk records for which the band received a 4 star review in Rolling Stone and is on tour across the U.S beginning in the fall of 2008.

They are dedicated to moving people physically and mentally as a means of affecting positive micro/macro cosmic change. Ra Ra Riot spends its time shaking the hands of foreign dignitaries, practicing, playing shows, eating pizza, writing strange band bios that sound like college application essays and going about the business of everyday life.

Though still infants in the world of music they have already developed significantly as people and musicians. They look forward to seeing how their sound morphs as they hit adolescence and the subsequent teen years. An invitation has been issued to come along on this journey of growth and self-discovery. Word.  - lastfm.com

Maps & Atlases

Maps & Atlases offer songs that wrestle themselves from flailing, algebraic fits of spazzy guitar notes and drum ruptures to lulling, voice-driven melodies that speak stories using lyrical images strung together like soup cans chasing a Cadillac. Mostly influenced by experimental and technically adept musicians such as Hella, Don Caballero, and Psych-Folkies Devendra Banhart and Six Organs of Admittance, Maps & Atlases create a distinctive blend of the intricate and organic.

MTV2 On the Rise Feature

Bowerbirds

The irony here lies in the fact that Bowerbirds, in concept and execution, have proved themselves anything but intentionally commercial. When the trio released its debut, Hymns For A Dark Horse, last year on small N.C. label Burly Time, the album could only be found in seven or eight record stores in the whole country. It was under the radar, a dark horse candidate, appropriately, for the lists of the year’s best albums, but the waves of approval and rave reviews nonetheless poured in. Blogs began buzzing; talk escalated about the trio with the acoustic instruments and naturalistic tendencies. “Nobody really expected any of that attention at all,” Moore reflects. “We were just happy playing shows with our friends in North Carolina. And we didn’t even really think about touring around the country even, back then.” But offers came, and they ended up sharing bills with one of their biggest supporters, John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats, as well as others like John Vanderslice, Phosphorescent, and now, Bon Iver.

They came across to their expanded audience like a tiny folk marching band that sings with the range of a church choir and the environmental reverence and abandon of a troupe of instrumentally-virtuosic Sierra Club representatives. Their tunes drip with lyrics about roots exploring the earth, about vast oceans and tides, about snails telling us humans to slow down. Moore writes about shaking off societal expectations and doing what’s right for the earth, for our souls, the same aesthetic reflected in the band’s instrumentation. “The songs in general, I guess, would be about that same kind of radical emotion, getting-to-the-root-of-things emotion,” he says. “I want to make sure when I write a song, make sure that the song stands out, and not try to cover it up with a bunch of effects. Just try to be very simple about it.”

Ultimately, the band left Burly Time to self-release the album. They met Phil Waldorf of Dead Oceans Records and secured a re-release for the record last week (June 17), complete with two bonus tracks, Secretly Canadian’s distribution channels and their first vinyl pressing. Now a whole planet of listeners have the opportunity to hold Hymns in their hands. — Paste Magazine

Scotland Yard Gospel Choir

One look at the debut album by The Scotland Yard Gospel Choir, and you’ll know immediately that this young band adores Scottish orchestral pop icons Belle and Sebastian to the point of near-fanaticism. You’ve got the soft-focus cover photo of a young indie girl, a tediously long band name that just happens to have Scotland in the title, and, of course, an ironic-sounding album title. If that’s not enough, turn the CD over, and you’ll see a host of song titles that smack of artsy preciousness: “Ellen’s Telling Me What I Want to Hear”, “Would You Still Love Me if I Was in a Knife Fight?”, “I Say the Stupidest Things Sometimes”. If you can’t stand Belle and Sebastian, you probably hate Belle and Sebastian wannabes even more, and a two-second peek at this album will be enough to send you away in disgust. However, if you’re a total sucker for gentle, thoughtful music like that, then you just might want to look give this one a try.

The thing is, The Scotland Yard Gospel choir hail from Chicago, not Glasgow, but their love of orch-pop runs so deep, they might as well hail from Scotland. The music on their new album, I Bet You Say That to All the Boys, is typically acoustic-based, as they combine folky male vocals (think Nick Drake) with pretty, breathy female singing (think Camera Obscura). There’s lots of cello, violin, flute, and flugelhorn peppering each song, with plenty of dry humor in the lyrics. The songs by singer/guitarist/keyboardist Elia Einhorn are unapologetically shameless in their worshipping of all things Belle and Sebastian, so much so, in fact, that Stuart Murdoch is name-dropped twice on the album (once in a song, and again in the liner notes), but despite the immense lack of originality in his compositions, they possess a soft, unassuming charm that’s impossible to deny.  – Popmatter.com

Spinto Band

The Spinto Band was formed in Wilmington, Delaware, where band member Nick Krill was rummaging through the personal effects of his late grandfather, the guitar player Roy Spinto. Roy had penned lyrics on the inside of Cracker Jack boxes. Nick found the lyrics that would inspire the creation of the Spinto Band. The band was originally composed of Jon Eaton, Thomas Hughes, Nick Krill, Joe Hobson, Sam Hughes, Jeff Hobson and Albert Birney (who has since left the band to pursue the visual arts).
Eight years and seven self-released albums later, the Spinto Band is in the prime vein of musical prowess. Utilizing an indie-pop sensibility that brings to mind the Flaming Lips and Pavement, their songs can send you careening into the heights of lysergic bliss or provide the catchiest vibes to shake your tail feather to.
Currently teamed up with Nashville producing duo, Robin Eaton and Lij (of Alex the Great recording studios), and preparing a May release through Bar-None Records, the band’s sound exudes a finesse that belies their youth (their ages range from 20-25). With rich, textured guitars, and multiple-part vocal harmonies, the Spinto Band’s repertoire is a maelstrom of indie perfection. It’s quirky, energetic, radiant, and aptly engaging.
The Spinto Band has performed with such acts as the Trachtenberg Family Slideshow Players, and Of Montreal.  – Lastfm.com

Rural Alberta Advantage

Toronto-based trio The Rural Alberta Advantage (Nils Edenloff, Amy Cole, and Paul Banwatt) play indie-rock songs about hometowns and heartbreak, born out of images from growing up in Central and Northern Alberta. They sing about summers in the Rockies and winters on the farm, ice breakups in the spring time and the oil boom’s charm, the mine workers on compressed, the equally depressed, the city’s slow growth and the country’s wild rose, but mostly the songs just try to embrace the advantage of growing up in Alberta.

Beach House

Beach House’s otherwordly music is a slyu pickpocket of reveries from that delicate time between when your head hits the pillow and you hazily submit to slumber. Although “dream pop” sounds like would what happen if Rainbow Brite got the hankering to rock, it’s nevertheless become the elected label for the band’s muted sound.

“I love pop music, and I guess the music that we make is admittedly ethereal in some way,” says guitarist/keyboardist Alex Scally. “It’s just the tones and the soundscapes we like.” After meeting French-born Victoria Legrand through a mutual friend in Maryland, the two classically trained musicians detected their compatibility and peeled off from their first somewhat-dysfunctional band to form a now-inseparable pair.

Beach House’s first self-titled release was written in the anti-throes of Baltimore. The album garnered ill-fitting comparisons to more docile bands such as Slowdive and Galaxie 500, some of which Scally sheepishly admits he has yet to hear. But the duo’s sophomore record, Devotion, is a child from a different climate. Penned during tours with the likes of the Clientele and Grizzly Bear, the cozy lineage of songs crawls with MicroKorg synth chords, slide guitars and Legrand’s breathy alto. “Compared to the first one, [Devotion]’s a million times more tense. It is subdued, but everything about it is crystal and obsessive and tight,” Scally says. “If you think about the first record as a lazy compliment, this one is a stinging insult.”

Both musicians have very particular ideas about the way their output should sound, Scally says. “I have never spent as much time around somebody in my life as Victoria.” But they relish in the intensity of a duo’s dynamics and “trying to get the most out of a few instruments,” even if it means spending saturated amounts of time together. “I don’t think your life is ever the same from year to year,” Scally says. “Hopefully when we sit down and start writing our third record, we’ll be in some new climate.”  — Paste Magazine