With the new year, there are new music things to look forward.

A new Mountain Goats album and tour, news and free mp3 here

Malkmus will also be on tour

I'll try and pick up tickets to these shows this week.

There's also a new Times New Viking album, which I am hoping lives up to the good things I've read about them.

Here's an interview about the Yo La Tengo freewheeling shows; the tour has a new southern part, with Kurt Wagner opening. It's been quite a while since I saw Lambchop, and I'd like to see them again.

HARP: I asked if you had any epiphanies about each other, but is there anything in general these shows tell you about Yo La Tengo fans?

KAPLAN: One of the things the three of us have in common is that if we went to a show like this, we’d all be very unlikely to ask a question because we’re kind of reserved people. Part of the reason that these shows are appealing is finding that part of your personality that’s good at this and overcoming the part of your personality that makes it difficult. But the kind of people we are, and the ones we gravitate to, are the people who are just going to sit there and not ask a question. So in a way we’re almost trying to form a bridge between us and people in the audience whose attitude toward themselves is, ‘okay, just be quiet.’ Instead we’re trying to make them productive members of society. [laughs] For the most part it’s gone really well. At this point, we’re doing this leg of the tour only because of how much we’ve enjoyed the other ones. All the ulterior motives that went into this tour are gone. The opportunity to just do the show a little more and eat some barbecue is the reason we’re doing them.

Here's an article about the new Destroyer album. There is a free mp3 at Merge's site.

There is also a new Merge band Wye Oak who have a nice sounding mp3 at the same site.

Here's an interview with Stephin Merritt

MJ: The new album is made up entirely of three-minute pop songs. What is it about that form that's so appealing?

SM: I don't really think it's about it being appealing. I think it's about what sounded good on a 45 rpm single. Longer than three minutes started degrading the sound quality, and the sound quality was already crummy enough that you didn't want to do that. So rock music was defined by what sounded good on a 45. We've gone absolutely back to the days of the 45. We have the crummiest sound systems playing songs that don't fit together into albums, and basically we're back into very poor sound-quality format, only now we have much tighter radio formatting, so that everyone has to play within some very small number of genres to get on the radio at all.

Here's another brief profile on Distortions.

Here is an article about Mark Oliver Everett of the Eels with excerpt from his autobiography

Cat Power youtube videos to promote Covers 2/Jukebox