I am so happy that Brooklyn rock band Oneida is still making great music. They have a new album, Absolute II, coming out soon and I can’t wait to hear it.

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The best new music I’ve heard recently is coming out of the East Coast. The band Full On is fronted by Shana Falana, who has been part of the music scene for the past decade, with a voice that is both gorgeous and tough. She’ll grab you and pull you in. Rawk on!

Over at our sister site, My Secret Playlist, Angus Andrew and his Liars bandmates have written about their eight favourite songs right now, including The Legendary Pink Dots song, Black Highway [listen below]: ‘I’m completely fascinated by The Legendary Pink Dots. Usually when I listen to music, there’s a large part of my brain focusing on the techniques and ideas, and how they relate to my approach to music. With the Legendary Pink Dots, they somehow suspend this preoccupation. They inspire me to be more free and spontaneous, all I hear is creativity in their music. I hear a release from self imposed structure, and a pure and simple connection with the flow of creativity’. Read the rest of Liars Secret Playlist

Directed by Benjamin Hoste, the stop motion animation clip for LA art-rock trio, The Happy Hollows, is accentuated by a barrage of random shapes, a matted water color palate and the occasional splatter of paint. We’re giving away a Happy Hollows prize pack featuring a copy of their debut album, Spells, a t-shirt, 7″ vinyl, magnet and two autographed stills from the video. To enter, just leave the name of the city you live in below this giveaway post.

Captivating! That’s about the only word I can think of to describe this devastating (wait, there’s another) live performance by Beth Ditto from Olympia, Washington band The Gossip. They are red smoking hot. And she knows it.

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London-based Scanners will be dropping their Stephen Hague (New Order) produced sophomore album, Submarine, next week on Dim Mak. The band are then headed to South by Southwest. We have a free download of their second single, We Never Close Our Eyes [listen here] in our Music Download section [psst, it's in the third column on the Lost At E Minor home page]

As many fans of the genre know, Turkey produced a lot of great psych folk and rock in the ’70s. 3 Hur-El and Mogollar are two of the more well-known acts from those days, their louder, more rock ‘n’ roll sound drowning the likes of singer/composer Bulent Ortacgil, a more soft-spoken and contemplative figure in Turkish rock history. His quiet, spare, and understated acoustic style punctuated have garnered him comparisons to Nick Drake and Cat Stevens, and with the recent re-release by Korean label 1 Numera of his 1974 debut album, Benimle Oynar Misin, he’s set to reach a new generation of fans outside his home country.

Having played South By South West over the past couple of years, Golden Bear have just released a souped up new EP, Everest, which sees the Texan rock band playing together like they would at a rehearsal or a show. Says frontman Chris Gregory: ‘I was a little anxious about being able to approximate the sound of our live show in the first place, but I figured to hell with it-let’s give it a shot. And I’m glad we did. There were no endless nights of playing the same song 150 times, no overscrutinaztion, and in all honesty, no hitches in the plan whatsoever. It was loose, rowdy, and rewarding, just like our shows’. You can download the Golden Bear track, All The Stars [listen below], for free via the Music Download section in the third column of the Lost At E Minor site.

The crew at 4AD, watching over perhaps the hottest artist roster of any independent label in the world, have put their collective minds together and come up with an album that holds every potential of being the finest release of the year. The formula is simple: you grab a batch of the hottest bands and artists around at the moment (take your pick from Arcade Fire, Yeasayer [pictured above], Bon Iver, Beirut, Sufjan Stevens; the list continues without the slightest dip in quality), throw in David Byrne for a touch of that priceless musical wisdom, quickly hammer together a few inspired duos, like Gillian Welch and Conor Oberst, or The Books and Jose Gonzalez, name it after a seminal Blind Willie Johnson track, and then get the brains behind one of the great bands of the last few years, The National, to produce it. Finally — take a deep breath — all the proceeds go towards the fight against AIDS. Dark Was The Night isn’t released until February 16th, but the scent on the wind is good. David Byrne and the Dirty Projectors’ opening track (listen below) is brilliantly fresh, while Yeasayer have channelled their wild spirits into a song textured as intricately as a Peruvian silk skirt, with a rainstick for effect.

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The last time I caught up with London-based, Australian band, Howling Bells, was in New York in early 2007 when they played a show at one of the many seedy Lower East Side bars. Since then, they’ve recorded a new album, the aptly named Radio Wars [listen to their song, Treasure Hunt, below], a remarkable follow-up to their 2006 self-titled debut. I checked in with guitarist Joel Stein to find out what music the four-piece had been listening to around the time the album was written: ‘The Byrds’ Eight Miles High always sounds so futuristic to me. It has one of the best guitar sounds ever and really moves me with its color and power. Every time I hear the Tortoise track, I Set My Face to the Hillside, I instantly get transported to the ocean. Beautiful! Joy Division’s Isolation is incredible. I love the intro keyboard riff, in particular (the keyboard was self-built). It expresses urgency and truth. And then there’s Neu!’s Hallogallo, a truly inspiring instrumental track that I always want to go on for longer. Its fuzzy guitars are so warm and vibrant. Perfect!’ Read frontwoman Juanita Stein’s Playlist of inspiring songs.

New York-based photographer Michael Lavine took the iconic photo of Kurt and Courtney for the cover of Sassy magazine back in the early 1990s. We asked him to recount the story behind the shoot: ‘We shot the photos at my Bleeker St loft on the Bowery. I remember that my friends Andrea Linett and Janet Billig were there. I remember the ridiculous twelve foot silk lighting setup I used. I remember people having to go out and score dope. I remember Kurt telling me that the reason that he loved Courtney so much was that she was the only girl he knew that would stand up at a party and smash a glass table to bits just for the hell of it. I remember thinking that was a pretty odd reason to love someone’. There’s an extensive interview with Michael Lavine on the Feature Shoot website.

Philip Norman’s recently released biography of John Lennon, aptly titled The Life, captures the true essence of a man who was a well of contradictions, his peaceful exterior masking an explosive temperament that surfaced far too often for those who were in his inner-sanctum. And it was a virtually impregnable sanctum to crack, unless, of course, you were a fourteen year old kid with a reel-to-reel tape deck. In 1969, a Beatles fanatic called Jerry Levitan snuck into John Lennon’s hotel room in Toronto and recorded him discussing his thoughts on peace, love, and all things in between. This amazing video is the end result of that conversation: ‘Using the original interview recording as the soundtrack, director Josh Raskin has woven a visual narrative which tenderly romances Lennon’s every word in a cascading flood of multipronged animation. Raskin marries the terrifyingly genius pen work of James Braithwaite with masterful digital illustration by Alex Kurina, resulting in a spell-binding vessel for Lennon’s boundless wit, and timeless message’.

Already with a Spectrum show under their belt, The Archerbolds are an up and coming Australian band well worth checking out. I saw the Sydney-based lads play recently at the Mars Hill Café and it was evident that they should be permanently rocking out on a real stage; not in front of coffee sippers. Their floating lyrics, smart guitar riffs and meaty bass lines are infused by The Strokes, Mars Volta, The Beatles, and Led Zeppelin — ultimately producing a freshly spun modern-vintage sound. Lead vocalist and guitarist Geoffrey ‘Gep’ Rectin says The Archerbolds plan to create a solid sound for next year: ‘Over summer, we’re recording an EP and working on a set sound, defining more of an image’. If their track, Rest Your Soul, is anything to go by, then it should be pretty dandy.

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It’s hard to find a misstep on the full-length debut from Melbourne band, Children Collide. The Long Now doesn’t sound like a first album: its mature, yet completely varied sound and lyrical concept makes it feel like something you’d expect from a band on their third or fourth album (you know, after the ‘cursed’ second album). Children Collide are most definitely in control, something that could have been lost while working with big-name producer, Dave Sardy. It’s rare that you pick up a CD and feel like the band has decided on everything, right down to the artwork that encases their killer album. We threw guitarist-singer Johnny Mackay a few questions about how they managed to wrap everything up in such a … errr … tight little package.

You seemed to have focused a whole lot of genres, into one clean tight sound. Is that something you guys have honed over the last few years?
‘Well, I’d say it’s more a result of us being people who appreciate a lot of different types of music. We get bored if songs sound too similar and prefer the sound of our instruments to be more what connects the songs rather than their style. Clean and tight? Sometimes I guess’.

Were you waiting to get to a certain point with your sound before you took the plunge to record the album?
‘Not really. Our sound goes out in all kinds of directions and there are songs on this record that we have played from our first gig along with songs that were written more than three years later. I would have been happy to record an album with the first twelve songs we ever wrote but that didn’t happen. Now we’ve written probably about 80 and have demo’d more than 60 of those. There’s no clear evolution in our sound, only an increasingly varied dynamism. Well, that’s my hope anyway’.

Lyrically, the album navigates quite a bleak social landscape. Where does this ‘end of the world’ inspiration come from?
‘It’s probably my way of accepting the mortality of all things. Or taking mortality to a macro level. Lyrically I often theorise and question rather than make statements, so a lot of it just me dreaming up an abstract “what if” rather than a cynical diss on the state of the planet’.

The silver-moon-scratch-panel on my copy of the album revealed the Earth, what are the other possible versions?
‘One is a clock, which mysteriously points to just after eleven minutes past ten. A crazy, unintentional coincidence with the date we released 11/10. The other is the Voyager gold record. When they sent out the Voyager spacecraft in the 70s they included a record that contained images and sounds from earth in case any aliens found it I guess. It also has a diagram depicting the location of earth’.

How does it relate to the album?
‘Well, I tend to write a lot of lyrics that allude to concepts of space and time in different ways. The images probably relate to the title more actually, which, in turn, relates to the songs’.

Very few band reunions get me excited, but I’ve consistently loved Faith No More since I was 13. I loved their pre-Mike Patton era, I loved King for a Day, and I even loved their track with Boo Yah Tribe on the Judgment Night soundtrack. Kerrang recently hinted that a FNM reformation is in the works for ’09, and though bassist Billy Gould has emphatically denied the rumors, the general consensus is that the reunion is on.

We have a copy of the new Flaming Lips’ DVD, Christmas on Mars [out Nov 11] to give away to a randomly selected US-based subscriber to our weekly email publication who leaves a message under this post telling us their favourite Flaming Lips song.

Arriving two years after their debut, Settle Down City, Old Wounds completes Young Widows’ transformation into a top-shelf rock band firing on all cylinders. Forging the best parts of Nirvana, The Jesus Lizard, Nick Cave, PJ Harvey, Fugazi and The Melvins, Old Wounds is a series of dynamic, thoughtful tunes anchored by cavernous grooves that will certainly push most speakers to their breaking point. For the unique production, the band reunited with uber-producer friend Kurt Ballou, who had been eager to experiment with recording the band in multiple environments, with the intent of capturing the definitive take of each song for the final cut of the album. Feeling most at home when they’re not at home, they brought Ballou along on tour to record all of their live shows. After tediously combing through a dozen hours of recordings, they compiled and mixed the album. The result is a bonafide classic, overflowing with the sweaty euphoria of a great live show, and the high replay value of a perfectly sequenced, well-produced rock record. Listen to the Young Widows track, Old Skin.

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Fans of Australian buzzsaw rock trio, The Vines, might like to check out our sister site, My Secret Playlist, where drummer Hamish Rosser has written about eight songs he’s digging right now. There’s some interesting choices in there including The Strokes, James Brown, and, gulp, Joan Jett.

A full seventeen years after their last album (The Spaghetti Incident doesn’t count), Guns n’ Roses – well, Axl Rose, anyway — is finally set to unleash a new album on the world. The ridiculously belated album has been delayed for so long, it’s a wonder why anyone still cares, but it does seem that Chinese Democracy will finally hit the shelves next month. Believe it or not, Guns n’ Roses are one of the most popular bands in China, one of the first Western cultural imports to gain notoriety after the country began opening up in the early ’90s. Whether or not the wait will be worth it is still unclear — the track available on the band’s website won’t blow anyone’s mind — but at least we will soon be able to move on with our lives.

When Bloc Party performed Banquet and Talons at MTV’s Video Music Awards in Brazil, it was very different to their routinely live shows. A last minute backing track request saw the indie heroes perform nothing more than a pantomime. Perhaps it was a ballsy ‘screw you MTV’ attack for supporting the myriad of artists who choose to mime. Regardless, I’m absolutely pumped and cannot wait for Bloc Party to grace Australian shores next month.