Busting out

Dancing On Our Graves - The Cave Singers

I love how the percussion seems to skitter in every direction, like a bag of BB pellets loosed in a school gymnasium, like a tapdancing marathon in a bowling alley. It's as if The Cave Singers handed everyone they saw a pair of sticks and various jingle-jangle makers and asked them to paint the sun in rhythm.

From Invitation Songs (Amazon, eMusic), Myspace

Your Stories - Parachutes

I felt reassured by this--that I'm not crazy to find music in the thwack-thwack of tires on wet asphalt or the slow rumble and screech of El trains, that it isn't odd to hear a grade-school playground at recess as a comic opera or a dog yapping at the start of his walk, a hymn of thanksgiving. But the article's right about identification and pleasure: Once some sounds are demystified, once we know their origin, they aren't as pretty any more. So let's just say this band of Icelanders, Parachutes, pieced this song with scraps of copper-haze sundown, with children's sleep-scabbed, yawned and happy morning greetings, with soft rain and the winter's-break crack of ice, the curious bird-chirp of squirrels. With peonies busting out all over, white and fuchsia.

Myspace

And:

Fantastic vintage color photos of American cities. The above image of the Chicago cityscape in the 1940s is taken from this set.

Frightened Rabbit's Sings the Greys has been rereleased for American consumption. Now no one has an excuse not to buy this album.