Here's a good review/overview of The Mountain Goats and Get Lonely:

The hint is that the big dramas that fuel most storytelling are too simple next to the miniature deaths of the spirit that people undergo each day, agonies so petty one is ashamed to voice them.

Darnielle is like the painter for whom large colourful canvases no longer seem a challenge, and drawing one exquisite line becomes the Grail. It's as if he has just got started.

Here's a live review of M. Ward:

his strum-and-pick guitar style and his not-quite-hoarse voice make their own little place in the world, happily out of time.

Decemberists Guest List on Pitchfork

Optical Atlas points to youtube video from the Observatory (Elephant 6 sort of supergroup) covering R.E.M. songs last week in Athens, GA

Here's an article about the Minus 5

Here's a NY Times comics feature


)The first part of Seth's graphic serial is out today(PDF)
Here's an NY Times Magazine article about Michel Gondry

Here's an article about Lambchop:

"Now there are things [on the album] that are more or less, in a loose way, based on fact."

Case in point: "The Decline of Country and Western Civilization," in which Wagner warbles, "Soon I can do just what I please / But I still hold my hip each time I sneeze." According to Wagner, "that's actually pretty factual and about as close as I get to descriptive of a particular thing that was going on."

What was going on was that as Wagner, 43, started work on the band's ninth album, a routine visit to the dentist's office became a lot less so when an examination revealed that his jaw had been eaten away by a virulent cyst. Wagner had surgery to replace his jaw with bone from the top of his hip -- a tough way to get a lyric.

After that, he survived a life-threatening brush with prostate cancer.

A cheerful album did not seem in the cards.