this year is so wonderful it is almost getting impossible to keep tabs on all the great bands releasing albums. here are more, with (hopefully) descriptions to come soon:

the new pornographers - challengers
a snowcone, a pumpkin or two, ride around the lake in a radio flyer, roast marshmallows at night, skip town next week and never look back. balloons!!!

the polyphonic spree - the fragile army
is it a cult? is it fake? RAINBOWS!! ooh-la-la. srsly, rainbows, and sundry happy things flow freely, you know, like a river of happy.

panther - secret lawns
bizarro napoleon dynamite feeding live cats to dead mice; also, bizarro napoleon dynamite is holding many shotguns and perhaps there is a tank parked outside. he eats a lot of ramen and macaroni.

you say party! we say die! - lose all time
dance dance dance; frantic beats and über-hot melodies; time is lost

liars - s/t
strange monsters and demons and acid-toting lovebeasts chanting in languages of pseudo-beauty, semi-dance, kind-of-crazy; and mating.

minus the bear - planet of ice
guitar solos! monkey! knife! fight! let’s party. for realz this time.

architecture in helsinki - places like this

chromeo - fancy footwork
this makes me feel totally metro and want to go to the gay bar for martini and manicure night in hopes of getting hit on (but politely saying ‘no’) by the mobs of heaving gays.

oh my god - fools want noise

justice - †
breakdance in the back of an alley for your life and your soul. avoid the stabbings with your killer danse moves; YOU have the skillz, my lovelies! (save the cheerleader dancefloor save the world.)

shout out louds - our ill wills
less sad than the cure and more neue than new wave; kind of like a windy day in a suburban graveyard (a happy graveyard with no zombies or ghosts)

art brut - it’s a bit complicated

caribou - andorra
sort of like the ’60s plus blonde redhead plus a sky filled with birds plus an aurora borealis. i think i might drive to the north pole and never come back.

shellac - excellent italian greyhound

chuck ragan - feast or famine
break out the bottles of whiskey and drive with me across the country and let’s live in montana and stay in wyoming for awhile and maybe there will be a ghost town at some point and we can chill at the local tavern and walk down the dusty roads and then leave without a trace.

queens of the stone age - era vulgaris

air - pocket symphony

the white stripes - icky thump

the dear hunter - act I: the lake south the river north

tegan & sara - the con
hip and kind of sad, but in a way that makes you sweat tears and dance on them all night long

pinback - autumn of the seraphs

the kbc - on the beat!
neon colors and little grizzly cubs and studly dudez and babez rolling around in a meadow and holding hands and playing red rover with disco balls. isn’t this perfect? damn right it is!

editors - an end has a start
interpol on vicodin + coldpay = sort of rainy but less suicidal joy division.

BOAT - let’s drag our feet
this record is relaxing like dinosaur jr. and styled in pavement-like slackertude and melodic like stars or beta band and it’s like a huge snowcone of chillaxed awesomeness waiting to be eaten while walking through a park.