Independent music is a jungle, my friends, and the search for good tunes is a safari. Luckily for you, I am a barely qualified tour guide with the grandest of machetes I like to call a blog. Using this dangerous instrument I cut through the brush and unecessary underhang that blocks our journey, however sometimes I will come across a patch of vines and tree trunk that is seemingly too tough to pass through. This is when I, your leader, stop posting for a month and re-focus my sights on the music that is actually speaking to me.

Here is all I’ve been listening to the past few weeks. Here are the records I think are truly deserving of your hard earned money. Here is music you can enjoy without being friends with the band who wrote it. Here is the stuff that legends are made from. Here is what happens when you forget to lock your car door.

Here is now!

Low - Breaker (from their up coming SubPop album Drums & Guns due out March 20th)

Their last full length, The Great Destroyer, was the perfect balance of slow-core and accessible melodies. Their newest Drums & Guns slips back into a more glacier like pace but it still contains enough of Low’s smart songwriting to be worth listening to again and again. Purchase the record when it drops March 20th.

The Arcade Fire - Neon Bible (from the Merge album Neon Bible, out now)

Neon Bible is the best record I’ve heard so far this year and ‘Neon Bible’ is my favorite song from that record. Beautifully understated & whispered, it draws me in with its delicate guitar work and quiet layers of strings and drums. The Arcade Fire have proved themselves to be the real deal.

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! - Love Song No. 7  (from the self released album Some Loud Thunder, out now)

Life has a funny way of working.  When Clap Your Hands Say Yeah released their debut album to critical acclaim, I found the record to be a bit…undeserving.  For the quirky, raw style they were going for the production seemed pretty flat and conventional.  To me the songs were boring.  Fast forward to a year and a half later and now things are pretty much the opposite.  Their new album Some Loud Thunder is being panned by critics and I am somehow loving the shits out of it.  People say the bad production is pretentious, but I think it adds a great deal of personality to this already eclectic and experimental batch of songs.  Along with Neon Bible, this is the only thing I’ve been able to listen to the past few weeks.  Whenever I put another cd in I am immediately presented with the need to remove it and replace it with Some Loud Thunder.