You know you’re getting old when you start saying to yourself “I haven’t seen this band live for 20 years.” Low is one of those great, quiet, enduring indie bands that rode the backside of the Nirvana revolution 20 years ago. Making music from Duluth, MN for esteemed labels like Vernon Yard, Kranky and Sub Pop the band has been consistently touring and playing for quiet appreciative crowds in clubs all over the world, making, at times, barely enough noise to elicit a sway in the room entranced by the ethereal vocals of Mimi Parker and the soulful intensity of husband Alan Sparhawk.

It has been years since I really dialed into a Low album but “C’Mon” has a few of the best songs of the decade. “Witches” is a big beautiful storm of cool that builds gradually, a subtle banjo groove keeping it anchored along the way, and the beautifully apropos “Try to Sleep”  whose “You try to sleep/Cause there’s never enough/Inside a dream/ You take a stand” floats along like a children’s song with just a hint of bitterness. Perhaps this band is acquired taste but after so many years I am thrilled that neither of us has given up on indie rock.  In the end Low always gets me high, and “C’mon,” recorded in an old church, infuses a kind of subtle spiritually into this beautiful minor masterpiece. For newbies please seek out their epic cover of Toto’s “Africa” on AV Club.

This year everything old seems particularly new again. Perhaps that is because I am now officially over forty, and I have been paying more attention to what is in the past than I ever did before.  There was a time not so long ago that bands were empowered to communicate directly with fans through a short lived (in retrospect) juggernaut called MySpace. Flash forward a few short years, and a few companies (Twitter and Facebook) have enabled bands to speak directly to fans without interference from the advertising littered, corporatized chaos that MySpace had become.  In an age where musicians rely on touring more than ever before, the portability of music on phones, tablets, Pandora, and wifi connected TVs and stereos has finally made listening to anything and everything, whenever and wherever, as easy as we thought it would be when we first started imagining a new paradigm a decade ago. For me Sonos, Spotify and my iPhone are the paraphernalia that hold my drugs of choice. This year I fell into an entirely new crop of retro soul, folk and power pop. With countless hours logged on airplanes and in airports, it’s hard to imagine what I would have done without the persistent soundtrack blown through headphones, on moving walkways and 747s. In a world without record stores, live shows fill the void, and the universal language of music is never more tangible than experienced from right in front of the stage at Fillmore, Coachella and the Greek, and this is what I listened to:

1) Local Natives – Gorilla Manor (Frenchkiss)

There are moments in life when the joy of the unexpected trumps the predictably incredible. This is rarely truer than when your first real exposure is watching a band you know very little about play live. This is how I first experienced Local Natives. I caught them early in the day at Coachella, not far from their LA home, and watched them rip through 50 of the most joyous moments of the festival. The blogosphere refers to the band as a kind of “Weekend Foxes,” but to me they are more percussive and with the anthemic intensity of a much bigger band. You can hear bits of “English Settlement” era XTC mixed with the rootsiness of Blitzen Trapper and the emotion of the Frames.

With all festival and internet buzz bands, there is a chance to outgrow the hype and really build an audience that extends beyond the tiny clubs of Austin or Indio. In an age where many bands can make a great recorded piece of work, the real skill shows in playing live and delivering contagious energy and authenticity. Local Natives are young, but their songs are big. On “Shape Shifter” think Coldplay, and perhaps My Morning Jacket on “Wide Eyes.”  I listen to them as I write this and can’t help but smile. Not bad for a bunch of kids from Silverlake, CA.

2) Stornoway – Beachcomber’s Windowsill (Rough Trade)

It took perhaps thirty seconds for me to know that “Beachcomber’s Windowsill,” the debut from Stornoway, was something rare and special. It reminded me immediately of how I felt when I first heard Belle & Sebastian well over a decade ago – a kind of pure happiness usually reserved for children, best heard on songs like “Boats and Trains” and “We Are Battery Human.”

Stornoway makes perfect pop music, theme music for a fairy tale, innocent yet cool. Musically the band mixes strings, banjo, and piano into a more traditional indie pop structure like their thematic and instrumental soul mates, The Decemberists (see ‘The Coldharbour Road’).  But ultimately Stornoway soars on the wings of infectious vocals and harmonies, part barbershop quartet part orchestral hipster. Every year there is one record that seems miles out in front of the next.  I hope this band can make as prolific a career of this as Belle and Sebastian have done. We all could use a little piece of our childhoods back, even if only for three or four minutes at a time. (more…)

The resurgence of Afrobeat music owes much to the confluence of three core factors: the great records by the Femi and Seun Kuti (sons of the afrobeat originator Fela), the increasing globalization of music, and the Broadway hit “Fela!” One of the core reasons that this genre never spread as broadly as reggae or rock, is both the musical complexity and the sheer number of band members required. The Budos Band, a five year old Staten Island instrumental big band of retro-funk and Afrobeat afficiandos, is among the most sophisticated to have emerged from the movement in years.

But what makes The Budos Band a natural and creative evolution of these core styles is the subtle incorporation of Middle Eastern (“Natures Wrath”), Cuban other various world music rhythms woven into a vibe suitable for a  blaxploitation chase scene (“Mark of the Unnamed”). A tune like “Unbroken, Unshaven, ” swings like the best of Fela’s big band classics, but if there one kink on III, it is that these songs are too short, almost like little teasers for what become long infectious grooves when performed live. For most people, instrumental music just feels empty, but to let yourself just drift into the luscious Budos grooves is to miss nothing and let every beat get under your skin. Like labelmates Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings, this band is a product of something very old, but very clearly something very modern.