If my body responds positively to an album as my mind rattles off a list of better bands, is the effect neutralizing? Locksley’s, Be in Love, a combination of upbeat ‘90s alternative and dance pop bands like OK Go and Hot Hot Heat, caused my feet to jangle to its…

Demons, spirits, ghosts, hell, graves, death, reapers, rattlesnakes, villains, spooks, ghouls, fools, disasters, decomposed bodies, and New Orleans: these are the (only) things Timber Timbre’s self-titled third album are made of.

Constant references to spoooooooooky-ness aside, Timber Timbre starts out nicely enough. Album-opener “Demon Host” begins with melodic guitar and…

Just for the fun of it, siblings Matthew and Eleanor Friedberger of the Fiery Furnaces parted ways for a time and each re-recorded six songs off an album they had just recorded together—2009’s Take Me Away. After asking fans to review Take Me Away without ever hearing it, Matthew felt…

Guitar virtuoso Kaki King doesn’t play her guitar so much as abuse it, using her guitar as a percussion instrument, slapping, rubbing and plucking the thing to create her intensely layered and complicated songs. The 30-year-old Atlanta native is the first ever female to be named a “Guitar God” by…

There’s a lot of melodic potential, it turns out, in the human voice, as much as in, say, a piano. Or a sax. Or a harp. Charles Spearin, of Do Make Say Think and Broken Social Scene, began experimenting with people’s voices as instruments about a year ago.…

Last year, Charles Spearin of Broken Social Scene casually interviewed his neighbors in downtown Toronto about happiness. Spearin, a practicing Buddhist, was not only interested in what his neighbors had to say, but also how they said it—the melodies, the rhythms, and the sing-song quality of their voices. Listening to…

You’re probably most familiar with Orba Squara’s “Perfect Timing (This Morning)” a.k.a. the song that launched a thousand iPhone commercials and the career of Orba’s sole member, New York-based musician Mitch Davis. To create his sweet and catchy songs, Davis typically uses “organic” instruments like glockenspiel, accordion, toy pianos, xylophone…