Ah, the delights of The Deli's Open Blog! NYC duo Very Fresh posted an open blog entry here a few days ago - we checked out their songs and... we were impressed! "Marker", in particular,  is a splendid song, very fresh sounding, slightly reminiscent of Liz Phair for the honest, fun delivery and the surprising melodic turns, but more chilled and intense - Phair's material was always so: "yeah whatever, this isn't really affecting me at all, dudes..."
This song shows a ton of potential and earns the band's EP "Americana" the Deli NYC's CD of the Month title. Amongst the other tracks we also like spare and dark "On Moot Point", while "The Clientele", which also displays a Barretesque love for unexpected melody twists, would benefit from better performances. 

The Noise Rock genre seems to have three main branches: the unstructured, purely noisy one that finds inspiration in Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music; the very structured, super poppy prong that likes to bury beautiful melodies under layers and layers of feedback and guitar noise - a la' Jesus and Mary Chain's Psycho Candy; and finally the still structured but inherently non-pop "thing" that Sonic Youth invented and then refined in their "mature" period, when they mastered the art of what can be called "dissonant songwriting": i.e. noise rock that works like pop music, but achieves that genre's "liberating" effect through the interaction of dissonant elements, rather than melodic ones. Adult Themes is one of the few bands that's developing that idea and making it their own. This band's deranged melodies and dissonant instrumental deviations somehow make perfect musical sense. Their controlled cacophony raises musical tension exactly to the point of alarm rather than ear piercing, unbearable madness. The songs in their debut 7" - Young Bodies and Four Fires - are perfect examples of this and mark an obvious improvement from the band's previous unreleased recorded material. Highly recommended. - PDG

This is one of those bands that make boys and girls fall in love (with each other and with their music, of course). The Naked Hearts are a not-entirely-bass-less rock duo (live, the bass exists as if by magic even if nobody is playing it, as we have personally witnessed!) which offer some extremely well crafted, melancholic, guitar indie-pop.
Amy Cooper (guitar and vocals) and Noah Wheeler (drums and vocals) are obvious musical soul mates - their voices perfectly complement each other, their songwriting is well integrated, and their performances are flawlessly tight. The simplicity of their guitar pop formula and the clean rock production may be reminiscent of The Strokes, but the main ingredients of their music (songwriting and overall mood in particular) make this debut a completely different beast.
"Mass Hysteria" exists in a musical limbo floating between Belly's hyper-melancholic psych pop ("Way I See You", "Dark Shade"), the more straightforward and up-beat guitar pop of Juliana Hatfield and PJ Harvey circa 1992 ("Boyfriend"), and the obvious Nirvana influences ("Call Me", "Mass Hysteria").
Of course, The Naked Hearts don't have the angst that characterized all grunge bands - but it's their generation that seems to lack that trait. Almost surprisingly, instead, the band uses that genre's musical signature and fills it with some sort of innocence that instills a refreshing quality. Maybe this is the way the unavoidable, almost due by now grunge revival will sneak back to our ears? The record has at least two singles with noteworthy potential: "Like I Do" and "Mass Hysteria" - true pop gems that build up and open up with harmonized choruses exactly the way we like it - this is stuff that could also work on the dance floor. Is there anything better than dancing intensely to an emotional rocking song, after all?

So this review was supposed to be published on a sunny spring day, but it's really gray out there. That might be a good thing nevertheless, because Mama Bear's "How We Go" is probably going to make some of you think of happy sunny days spent outdoors. Yeah, I know: it seems like every April all music reviewers MUST find their own album or song that perfectly incarnates the most enjoyable of seasons. Well we'll embrace this habit fearlessly, and go ahead and say that Mama Bear is the perfect band to boost your appreciation of Spring 2010 - and that they stole our hearts. The band's upbeat, folky tunes are catchy as hell, without lacking in intensity or intimacy, which makes them sound like a more fun and lighthearted version of 10,000 Maniacs. The simplicity and pop effectiveness of this band's songs, the beauty of the melodies and Vivi's outstanding voice and delivery might have the power to put an end to your SAD syndrome - for good. Don't miss their record release party at The Studio at Webster on 04.14, AND... DOWNLOAD THE EP FOR FREE HERE NOW!

Well it seems like the sounds from the 80s are back in vogue, right? All the cheesy blips and the "housy" synths and the gasping vocals and the campy clothing and so on and on and on... Well you won't find all this in The Secret History's debut CD "The World That Never Was". You will find references to to great artists from that decade which followed a more personal and sincere musical path though. We are referring (for example) to the melancholic, beautiful and supremely blip free tunes of 10,000 Maniacs, or the daring, electric songs of The Throwing Muses, and their spin off super-dreamy project Belly. Besides the songwriting, what really hits you here is Lisa Ronson's voice - warm and strong, it confers character and personality to the band's elegant tunes through melodies that are never banal nor foreign. We also recommend you to check out the band members' previous project, "My Favorite", which probably failed to emerge because of an unfortunate name choice in this "Google Age", but that has recently garnered some post-mortem attention from music scene fat cats Pitchfork.com.

Sebastian Krueger's Inlets will please the hoards of music fans who have grown to love the floral and somewhat progressive folk championed by Grizzly Bear and Beach House. Less grandiose than the first and sunnier than the latter, Inlets' songs are instantly gratifying and more soothing. Their tamed vocals resonate in a very intimate way, like it often happens with one man/woman band projects, and the melodies are not as convoluted as you may expect. Krueger finds trendy help in the backing vocals department, where Dirty Projectors' Angel Deradoorian leads a team of beautiful voiced ladies whose subtle vocal counterpoint contributes in the texture and melodic departments. Acoustic guitars, clarinets, pianos, strings, percussion, the unmissable ukulele but also synths and other keyboard sounds contribute to the band's tastefully layered orchestrations. The album Inter Arbiter is due out in April - we predict that this record will be one of the soundtracks of hipster love this summer. - PDG