Listen Before You Buy

When you get something truly fresh and original, you know instantaneously. “A Hammer To The Camera Lens” is exactly that.

TweetShare We’ve given Gardens & Villa some love on this site before, but somehow never got around to reviewing them. They’ve done their hard work, finishing their self-titled album and facilitating some more pure listening enjoyment, so now we’ll do ours. These fellows from Santa Barbara, California, have recorded a kind of sonic house party [...]

TweetShare I’ve often admitted that I’m not a huge fan of the Spanish music scene. There are very few bands that I’ve found myself enjoying, and most of the acts I do listen to (such as Polock or The Sunday Drivers), happen to sing in English. One welcome exception to this trend is vetusta morla (who prefer [...]

TweetShare “Re-Introducing”? This is a new feature to fill a little niche on LBYB, bringing some more attention to artists that we thought would explode but haven’t quite yet, or just throwing the limelight on an act that hasn’t had any recent releases that we just love too damn much not to write about. The [...]

TweetShare This post is a “QuickPick”. QuickPicks are my attempt at getting all of the music that’s sent to me that I like (or just music I like but have no words for because it’s so awesome!), out into the dubya dots, picked quickly. Less for you to read, more for you to hear. Artist: [...]

TweetShare Admittedly, I welcome when a song opens up my memory bank, overloading my senses with nostalgic associations. This new tune becomes a snowball of time and space that makes me spew more references than I know what to do with – if you haven’t yet noticed. Yet to stick, it’s got to do more [...]

TweetShare Lo-fi garage rock comes with a series easy observations; with it’s simple melodies it’s an easily accessible aesthetic, a sound that can easily be traced back to 60s surf influences. Chances are fairly high that if you’ve heard one lo-fi garage-surf band, which you will have done if you were paying any attention to [...]

TweetShare Listen Before You Buy is always looking for more writers and contributors, we just don’t always make posts like this to advertise the fact (even though to some it seems like this is ALL we do). That being said, below are the positions we have available (currently non-paying, but with the prospect of making [...]

TweetShareClick on the image to listen to Animal Collective – “Campfire Songs” for free.

TweetShare If you follow the site on Twitter or Facebook you’ll know that lately I’ve been talking a lot about Dreamers Of The Ghetto, and how much I’ve fallen in love with their debut album “Enemy/Lover”. Back at the start of September we tagged them as Ones To Watch and as they get ready to [...]

TweetShare It’s not much of a secret that Youth Lagoon‘s Trevor Powers is on the verge of being the most relevant aspect of indie music to come along this year. His debut album “The Year Of Hibernation“” comes out on the 27th and I’m nearly as excited about picking it up as I was for [...]

TweetShare Yesterday evening DOM, the guys who brought us the party summer hit of 2010 “Living In America” dropped two new tracks. “Crazy Girl” has been played live numerous times before and you might’ve seen some of the live versions of it kicking around online, but this time we have the studio version. With a [...]

TweetShare  Buy the album – Vinyl / MP3 / CD or Download it for free Annie Clark has gotten a whole lot of press lately. She’s been on the cover of Spin’s style issue and had plenty of wattage added to her star-power by places like Pitchfork. It’s a disappointment, then, that the album that’s getting [...]

TweetShare Dum Dum Girls’s new album “Only In Dreams” is being released next week and in anticipation of the release their label Sub Pop have put a stream of the album. The girls have already managed to enthrall us with the 2 or 3 cuts from the album we’ve heard already like “Bedroom Eyes”, and [...]

TweetShare I always figured cats could read minds, but it wasn’t until hearing “Little Boats” that I believed in the power of the Psychic Feline. “They spawned the jam band movement, which would come to include bands like Phish, String Cheese Incident, and Blues Traveler who carried the psych-noodling torch to subsequent generations” the band [...]

TweetShare I’ve noticed I get drawn to recordings that hint at a really visceral core, something that already has that voodoo that gets your blood running, makes you a little hot under the collar. I can see myself in a room with other sweaty people chanting these choruses. What a great thing for music to [...]