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JEFF The Brotherhood
Zone
Dine Alone Records
 
Zone the experimental new album from Nashville duo JEFF The Brotherhood was recorded in a converted warehouse called Club Roar and took about two weeks, 4 racks of ribs, a few dozen chicken wings, 3 pork chops, some sausage, a brisket, and a whole lot of smoke wood to make. Zone is the third installment in a spiritual trilogy of albums including Heavy Days (2009) and We Are The Champions (2011).
 
Dinosaur Pile-Up
Eleven Eleven
SO Recordings

 
Dinosaur Pile-Up’s last album, Nature Nurture, was the brilliant lovechild of Weezer and Redd Kross. Originally a one-man band, Eleven Eleven, is the sound of Dinosaur-In-Chief, Matt Bigland, cranking out the hits with his touring band. As usual, the songwriting is top notch but the full line-up brings about heavier, somewhat darker vibes, but the songs are still catchy AF.
Black Foxxes
I'm Not Well
Spinefarm Records
 
Hailing from Devon, England, Black Foxxes make songs that move from a whisper to a roar with a rampant, ragged glory. There’s also a level of strength drawn from the tight weave of music and message. With I’m Not Well Black Foxxes have planted their flag deep. Life through the eyes of vocalist / guitarist Mark Holley may not be rose-tinted, but his experiences add real weight to the songwriting, that often sounds like Radiohead’s lost grunge album.
 
Slim Cessna's Auto Club
The Commandments According To SCAC
Virtual Label

 
Jello Biafra once called Denver, Colorado’s Slim Cessna’s Auto Club "the country band that plays at the bar at the end of the world." Cessna et al’s new album, The Commandments According To SCAC, takes imbues SCAC retro aesthetics with some fire-and-brimstone dyamics. Fresh arrangements and raw power ensure that Slim Cessna’s Auto Club isn’t your typical busking scum. Play loud.
House Of Waters
House Of Waters
GroundUp Music

 
House of Waters are one of New York’s most unique bands. A merging of funk, Afrobeat, and pan-Asian exploration, the lush, dreamy quality of many of these songs disguises the fact that there are only three instruments in the band: the dulcimer, eight-string bass, and cajon. If global sounds with a psychedelic edge are your thing, then House of Waters will melt your brain.
 
Soundtrack
Florence Foster Jenkins
Decca


 
Florence Foster Jenkins (1868-1944) was a wealthy American heiress whose excruciating sense of pitch and rhythm were immortalized on a set of treasured 78-rpm discs. She’s now been immortalized in the film Florence Foster Jenkins that stars Meryl Streep in the title role and Simon Helberg (Big Bang Theory) as her long-suffering accompanist Cosme McMoon. Lovers of, ahem, “outsider art” will find much here to love.
Mats Eilertsen
Rubicon
ECM Records
 
Norwegian bassist Mats Eilertsen has been a strong and supportive presence on a dozen ECM sessions to date. With Rubicon he steps forward to present his own music with an international cast. Rubicon features original compositions commissioned from the Vossajazz Festival. After fine-tuning the material on tour they laid down Rubicon for posterity – the performances brimming with life and deep atmosphere – like Mingus recording with Eno.
 
Continental Drift
Various Artists
Slumberland Records

 
Frequent collaborators Slumberland Records and Fortuna POP! team up to bring you Continental Drift, a smashing eight song sampler of some of the finest pop out there in 2016, including the shoegaze punk of Wildhoney (Baltimore), the crunchy pop of Tigercats (London), the deeply-layered songcraft of Mercury Girls (Philly), and C-86 inspired jangle fuzz of The Spook School (Edinburgh).
Banks & Steelz
Anything But Words (Explicit)
WB

 
Banks & Steelz is Interpol’s Paul Banks and Wu-Tang mastermind The RZA. Together they’ve made propulsive hip-hop record that plays to the other’s strengths – which means great hooks, fierce bars, and productions that are both gritty and atmospheric. Post-punk meets Shaolin. They’ve got a deep squad, too, that includes luminaries like Ghostface Killah and Florence (of & The Machine).
 
Gallant
Ology
WB

 
Ology is the latest example of R&B that converses with folk and rock and dub and trip-hop and Sufjan and Top 40 in the way that everybody who listens to music does, and has for their whole life, not in no PBR&B type of way, but in a way that doesn't serve radio formats. Instead, Gallant's music serves us. It just might be possible that we're on our way to a fully populated spectrum of contemporary R&B” - NPR
Tall Heights
Neptune
Masterworks
 
Neptune is the major label debut album from Boston progressive folk duo, Tall Heights. Neptune is a far lusher construct than the duo’s early days busking in Boston, evidenced by the subtly chugging electric guitar on “Iron in the Fire,” the ethereal synthesizers and a spacious drums of “Spirit Cold,” and feedback created by two cellphones on “Cross My Mind.”
 
Beware of Darkness
Are You Real?
Bright Antenna

 
Beware of Darkness is a bold new power trio with an old soul, pissed at life in the modern age. They play fast moving rock songs with exploding key and rhythm changes mid-song. They also play slow-cooked, sexed-up, bluesy things. Imagine Bowie's "Hunky Dory" with low, detuned, primal, Zeppelin-esqe guitar riffs.
Cheerleader
The Sunshine of Your Youth
Bright Antenna

 
Philly-based quintet, Cheerleader, like their pop anthemic, dreamy, sweet, and nostalgic. Listening to their music will make you want to jump in the car, roll down all the windows basking in the music’s hazy, summery charm – a somewhat ironic sound given its propensity for 80s Britpop atmospherics, like on the absolutely sublime “New Daze.”
 
The Wombats
Glitterbug
Bright Antenna

 
Liverpudlian exports The Wombats’ music is exuberant and infectious, their alt pop tunes with a depth and confessional slant that’s rare in modern pop songwriting. They’re great smartasses, too, as tracks like “Let’s Dance To Joy Division” and “Moving To New York.” Glitterbug originally came out in 2013, but is finally getting the Stateside release it richly deserves. A couple of ace bonus tracks are thrown in to sweeten the deal.
Roosevelt
Roosevelt
City Slang


 
Towards the end of 2012, a 22-year-old Marius Lauber, working under the moniker Roosevelt, quietly released his debut single, “Sea” – a pulsating, hypnotizing slither of sun-kissed disco with its own self-made video. The world clamored for more – and now is self-title debut is finally here. Roosevelt is a pillow-soft hallucinatory dreamscape taking in acid funk, nocturnal reveries and a lilting sense of melancholia. Mixed by Chris Coady (Future Islands / Beach House).
 
Atmosphere
Fishing Blues
Rhymesayers


 
As Atmosphere steps into their 21st year of making music, Slug & Ant show no signs of slowing, compromising or losing sight of their vision. Fishing Blues may cause one to question if this the point in its career where Atmosphere chooses to step back, put up the “Gone Fishin’” sign and reminisce about their successes? Hell no. Fishing Blues both defines and redefines the Atmosphere sound – which is still some of the forward-thinking Hip Hop in The Game.
John Renbourn & Wizz Jones
Joint Control
Riverboat

 
Joint Control’s 13 songs wonderfully embody the fruits of Pentangle founder John Renbourn & Wizz Jones’s long friendship, capturing these two consummate guitar wizards performing together live and in the studio. The album is all the more poignant because it represents Renbourn’s final recordings – made just days before the British folk legend’s death in 2015.
 
In 2010, Local Natives galvanized a musical scene in Southern California with the breakout success of their debut album, Gorilla Manor. The band’s second album, 2013’s brooding and lovely Hummingbird, had a difficult birth, but its authors remember it fondly as a beautiful and honest representation of who and where the band was at the time. As the band began to grow, so too grew its lens… Now Local Natives filtered this whole new layer of influences through their spectrum, and the result is their grandest statement yet: Sunlit Youth. As opposed to culling song ideas from jamming, the band’s core trio of songwriters each produced songs on their own, rendering each writer prolific and vastly increasing the number of songs brought to the group space. Together they sussed out the best ideas and worked together in realizing their full potential. Across Sunlit Youth, Local Natives delve into dancier, poppy moments on “Past Lives” and “Masters,” Fleetwood Mac-inspired dark pop on “Dark Days”, blue-eyed-soul stomp on “Coins,” and prospective anthems on “Fountain of Youth” and “Call Me On.” And while this is new ground for Local Natives to some degree, Sunlit Youth never loses those qualities that made us fall in love with them in the first place… And you need it.

Local Natives -
Sunlit Youth

Loma Vista
moremusic
moremusic

The Coalition of Independent Music Stores (CIMS) is a group of some of the best independent music stores in America. CIMS was founded in 1995; its current membership is made up of 29 accounts that handle 47 stores in 21 states. Many of the accounts have been recognized by the music industry and their local communities for their outstanding dedication to customer service and developing artist support.

Each member is bound by its shared love of music, a reputation for great selection and customer service in its community, yet each CIMS account is as unique as the market it represents. Most importantly, CIMS member stores continually seek to challenge the jaded, color-by-numbers advertising and marketing of other retailers.

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