This is a band called Pens.

Last.fm describes them as 'three girls and a £1 microphone,' and that's exactly what they sound like.

I'm not sure what I think of them. I want to like them, but I find them a bit too scratchy and distorted, and I'm usually the first person to jump to lo-fi's defense.

However, they have a song called "Yeah Baby! I'll Take You To Bagel Town" and because of that, I will defend them to the death.

Based on this post from this post on Last Plane to Jakarta, I suspect that John Darnielle is kind of fucked in the head.

That aside, I agree with pretty much everything he says, and would like an excuse to get drunk right now just so that I could shout gleefully and off key to this, in between tripping over things and assuring my friends repeatedly that I 'LOVE THEM, MAN!' because that is pretty much what music like this is made for.

I must ask, though: Guys? You did realise that by naming yourselves The Beets, you guaranteed that the first reaction upon hearing your name, for most people, was going to be: 'Wasn't that the name of the band from Doug that did that Killer Tofu song?'

This is going to bother the hell out of me.

Times And Seasons

'I love this urban music! It makes me feel so young and poor!' -JPod

My friend James, who has spent most of his life in an upper class New Zealand suburb, put this together. It's not necessarily the reaction he was going for, but I cannot listen to it without envisioning it played live in a dive bar in Brooklyn, everyone present trying to look like they care less about what's going on than the people standing next to them; the sort of people who have put a lot of time and money into looking every bit as derelict as the homeless drug addict dying quietly in the ally next to the club where they go to bum clove cigarettes off of their friends between sets.

It has made me miss New York City terribly. Well done.

Shout It Out, Silhouette Shout From The Top

I've had conversations that began with things like, "Hey, doesn't this song sound exactly like that feeling you get when you've spent a really amazing day outside in the sun with your favourite people?" or "Hmm, I've just combed over these lyrics and realised that not once do they mention rain, which is really surprising because this song sounds exactly like how it feels to be stuck sulking inside all day when it's raining," and been surprised when the person I'm talking to says; "YES. I know EXACTLY what you mean," because I wasn't sure if I was making sense, even to myself.

I'm listening to the latest New Pornographers album, 'Together,' which was released earlier this month, and reflecting on how one of the things that I adore about The New Pornographers is that so much of their music sounds like how you feel when you realise that everything's going to be OK, even if, at the moment it's completely the opposite. At the moment, I have 'Sweet Talk, Sweet Talk' on repeat, and I'm not sure what it's about, or even if it's about anything at all, but I don't care because it accomplishes everything I've come to expect and love from The New Pornographers.

New Pornographers lyrics always seem like they contain some hidden meaning that's obscured by the fact that Carl Newman is such a Goddamned genius that no one else will ever be able to figure out what he's talking about. They don't. You can analyze them as much as you want, but, as Carl put it, there's no such thing as a letter from an occupant; he's honestly just stringing words together in a way that he thought sounded cool at the time of writing. Can you tell me what A mistake on the part of nature, it's forgiven, move on, won't wear my Sunday suit to walk that street, that would feel Byzantine actually means? Probably not, but when music feels like the knowledge that things are about to get a lot better than they are at present, in ways that you can't predict, how important is its meaning, or whether or not it even has one?

The New Pornographers - Sweet Talk, Sweet Talk