22, A Million is part love letter, part final resting place of two decades of searching for self-understanding like a religion. And the inner-resolution of maybe never finding that understanding. The album’s 10 poly-fi recordings are a collection of sacred moments, love’s torment and salvation, contexts of intense memories, signs that you can pin meaning onto or disregard as coincidence. If Bon Iver, Bon Iver built a habitat rooted in physical spaces, then 22, A Million is the letting go of that attachment to a place.

ベルギーインディフォーク最重要バンドと称されるDAN SAN! 極上の2ndアルバムが完成!

Monterey is The Milk Carton Kids’ third album and the follow-up to their 2013 breakthrough The Ash & Clay. The two years since have been significant ones for the band, with recognition including a GRAMMY® nomination for Best Folk Album and winning Group of the Year at the 2014 Americana Music Awards. Their standout performances and interviews in the Coen Brothers’ and T Bone Burnett’s concert documentary “Another Day/Another Time” brought the duo its widest audience yet, and their 55-city North American tour last Spring sold out months in advance.
This time around, Kenneth Pattengale and Joey Ryan wrote and recorded Monterey not in studios but on stages - those concert halls, churches, and theaters across North America that have always coaxed the band’s most uninhibited expressions. Their methodology in making Monterey allowed The Milk Carton Kids, finally, to perform for the record with the same fearlessness and spontaneity usually only achieved in live concert. As writers, the two have merged so singularly that friends and family can no longer tell who has written which song. As singers on Monterey, their acclaimed harmonies move farther apart, so that the quirks and kinks of two individual identities emerge, all the while remaining lush and soaring, their beauty even more apparent for the showing of their scars.
Thematically, Monterey takes us on a road trip across a dream - perhaps a nightmare - through an America of blood and fire that is at once recognizably the land of our forefathers, and the product of our own making. While some of the questions asked on Monterey are political, increasingly the songs are purely personal, the narrator stopped along the road wondering aloud how he got there as in the lilting title track where the question becomes, “Monterey, how can I say I’ll always stay then slip away?”
This may be the central question of Monterey, this album forged literally and metaphorically “on the road”, which seems to ask how we can resolve the contradiction between the lightness of our footprint as we pass through, and the weight of those memories gathering behind us in the rearview mirror. Monterey asks these questions with grace, beauty and a sly humor.

Following 2013's solo effort Prayer of the Woods, songwriter Tony Dekker is back to focusing on his Toronto folk rock ensemble Great Lake Swimmers. Their latest long-player is called A Forest of Arms, and it will arrive on April 21 through Nettwerk Records.
Rather than recording in a dedicated session, Great Lake Swimmers made the album over a number of sessions in a scattering of locations. Curiously, some guitars and vocals were captured in the Tyendinaga Cavern and Caves in Tyendinaga, ON. This is a change from the band's last album, 2012's New Wild Everywhere, which was the first time they had recorded in a proper studio.
As we reported last year, Dekker cited his experiences with the World Wildlife Fund, through which he witnessed the impact of the BP oil spill, as well as the Northern Gateway Pipeline controversy, as sources of inspiration for the band's new songs.
"I've been incubating these songs and we'll see how it goes. I am trying to work with a kind of concept or through line that incorporates my recent experiences," Dekker said at the time. "I had a chance to visit this place [BC's Great Bear region] and actually sailed from Kitimat down through these passageways seeing incredible wildlife — species that are indigenous to that area. If one tanker spilled, say the size of the Exxon Valdez, the entire area would be obliterated and so would a culture that has existed since the beginning of time."
Kevin Kane of the Grapes of Wrath appears on the album. It was engineered by Justin Shane Nace and then mixed by Howie Beck.
That's the cover artwork above. For a taste of what the band have cooked up, scroll past the tracklist to hear the lushly orchestrated, wistful folk rock number "Zero in the City."
Also below, see the group's tour schedule, which consists of plenty of Canadian shows throughout the upcoming months. U.S. dates will be announces shortly

Carrie & Lowell sounds like memory: it spans decades yet does not trade on pastiche or nostalgia. Stevens's gauzy double-tracked vocals wash across the dashboard of long-finned, drop-top Americana, yet as we race towards the coast we are reminded that sunshine leads to shadow, for this is a landscape of terminal roads, unsteady bridges, traumatic video stores, and unhappy beds that provide the scenery for tales of jackknifed cars, funerals, and forgiveness for the dead. Each track in this collection of eleven songs begins with a fragile melody that gathers steam until it becomes nothing less than a modern hymn. Sufjan recounts the indignities of our world, of technological distraction and sad sex, of an age without neither myths nor miracle and this time around, his voice carries the burden of wisdom. Carrie & Lowell accomplishes the rare thing that any art should achieve, particularly in these noisy and fragmented days: By seeking to understand, Sufjan makes us feel less alone.

Avi Buffalo return with At Best Cuckold, the follow up to their 2010 self-titled debut. That's the cover art above. Produced by the band's Avi Zahner-Isenberg, it's out September 9 in North America and September 8 in Europe via Sub Pop.

Mad About Mountains is an indie rock and melancholic country band from Belgium, founded by Piet De Pessemier.