As independent artists Josh Martinez and Sleep of Oldominion have somewhat different modes of expression, though they operate efficiently as synergistic celebrators of the lowbrow highlife, be it through booze, bud, or beautiful woman.  This delightfully simplistic credo was first delivered to the publiv with the Boss Hogg EP and then echoed again on the When Pigs Fly full length.  And here, on the Swine Country EP, the formula is intact and expanded prodigiously to incorporate seemingly disparate musical elements into one cohesive pattern.  But how do you take a group that has willfully named themselves after the Spanish word for pork rinds seriously?  You don’t.  You laugh at the ridiculous but still oddly insightful rhymes and acknowledge that humor-infused hip hop is a refreshing reminder that it’s acceptable to relax the gangsta lean and enjoy a sunset or two with a pina colada on hand.

Tereu Tereu’s debut LP takes on a riotous richness. Simultaneously explosive and catatonic, the coolly vibrant album builds from a long celebrated live presence and noted talent for foreign rhythmic and tonal journeys to bring the listener a most unusual slice of the band’s life.

Synth-driven pop is a niche in the music world that must be explored carefully.  If you stray too far into the ethereal plane there’s a risk of become too fluffy and cloudlike to offer any appeal to the standard listener.  Keep things too basic and you’ll end up in a place more industrial and unoriginal than Pittsburgh.  The key then is to find a healthy balance between both extremes without overdoing either, while also maintaining a diverse arrangement of melodies and harmonic structures.  Au Revoir Simone, an all-girl trio from New York, have been doing that with increasing levels of success since 2003.   Their third record Still Night, Still Light is a record that presents their heightened ability to craft indie pop atmospherics with angelic alternating vocals and sparse instrumentation.

Heartache has long been a source of inspiration for musicians.  It is the bemused muse, in that something so simple to fall into is so confusingly anguished to fall out of.  Something that felt so good is now a seemingly endless source of pain.  And pain, of course, is a uniquely creative catalyst for all forms of art.  Incumbent Canadian hip hop king Buck 65 knows this like no one else, translating idiosyncratic memories into music at once amusing, appealing, and deeply sincere.  Normally he utilizes turntables and laptop to transmit his message to the world but in Bike For Three! he teams up with Belgian electronica producer Joëlle Phuong Minh Lê (Greetings From Tuskan) to coalesce his brand of whiskey-voiced storytelling with her richly atmospheric beats.  The fact that they have never met isn't even an issue.

The Pacific Northwest isn’t known for much besides potatoes (thank you Idaho), the nation’s second largest bookstore (hats off to Powell’s in Portland), and grunge.  Pearl Jam continues to carry the latter’s legacy onward, but every other band from that era of shredded jeans and flannels tied around the waist have either moved on or dissolved into the ether.  But somewhere underneath the shadow of the Space Needle hip hop has taken root and dispersed throughout the region with the likes of the Blue Scholars, Boom Bap Project, and the underground’s answer to the Wu Tang Clan, Oldominion.  Enter Sandpeople, an independent hip hop group operating under the auspices of Oldominion and offering several self-released records for the public to enjoy.

On paper Narrows is a metal supergroup of sorts, composed of former Botch vocalist Dave Verellen and These Arms Are Snakes guitarist Ryan Fredericksen, as well as members of Unbroken and Nineironspitfire.  Weave the inspiring elements of all those bands together and you should have some kind of angular and powerful musical mitochondria that sends limbs and heads into involuntarily quixotic rotations, right?  New Distances should therefore be a surging and unrelenting encomium to all things devastating and soul-crushing, yes?  I am obliged to inform you that this is quite sadly not the case and that, my friends, is a goddamn shame.

The latest release from spectral Bay Area tone weavers dredg finds the creative waters of the band unsullied by dilution but drastically refined.  Highly anticipated, The Pariah, The Parrot, The Delusion, the band’s June 9th release finds the surrealist scatter tones of the ethereal electric quartet at its most complete.

Los Angeles based recording artist Brian Williams has spent a career enshrouded in a veil of intrigue emanating from the subsonic ruptures of his tonal scaffolding. From his creative inception during the days of early punk and industrial music to extensive collaborations with members of Tool, Isis and The Melvins, Williams has stayed current in a tide of musical change. The mind behind Lustmord and the pariah poster child for massive production talks about the insanity of creativity and the landscapes of inspiration.

I’m just going to come right out and say it: Cecil Otter is an emcee with such a powerful command of words and an album so masterfully realized it had to be released once independently, twice on a limited basis for Doomtree Records, and a third time under Strange Famous.  You see, in the vast smorgasbord of hip hop offerings available on the east and west coasts there is a largely untapped Midwest scene doing its best to earn its place in the sun.  Cincinnati’s Scribble Jam has done wonders to this end, as have acts like Atmosphere, Illogic, Brother Ali, and Binary Star.  But somewhere along the line Otter’s voice was lost like a terrific spell of strep throat, and it’s taken the forward thinking of Sage Francis et al to restore him to his stentorian strength.

Artists that have been around for a while will, at some point or another, be confronted with a dilemma in retirement: is it better to go out with a bang or to slowly fade away?  Kurt Cobain chose the former in the ultimate literal sense, while ailing and decrepit one-off hair metal bands like Poison continue to contaminate the audio well with fetid reunion tours designed solely to refill bankrupt accounts.  And then there are bands like metal stalwarts Zao that do something in between.  They try to rejuvenate a stagnant state of affairs by revamping their style to make it seem streamlined, modern, and hip.  There may have been some doubt left for Zao in this regard after their transition from Christian label Solid State to metalcore imprint Ferret, but their ninth album Awake? solidifies the reality of this middling process, commonly referred to as selling out.