Andy Beta

When British Columbia musician Teen Daze appeared with his bedroom-recorded 2010 debut, Four More Years, the title of that eight-song cassette might have seemed presumptuous. Five years later, Teen Daze has matured musically and covered new ground. Credited to a twentysomething named Jamison (no surname given), Teen Daze began to ...

Montreal's Michael Silver took the call letters from his local television station to release his first music as CFCF in 2009. While his debut album, Continent, was full of pop informed by disco, electro and soft-rock (complete with a sexy, R&B-indebted take on Fleetwood Mac's "Big Love"), the ...

Encounter a staggering voice — be it in concert, on the subway platform or on American Idol — and the adage goes, "she could sing the phone book." That's not quite what London singer Benjamin Clementine does in the opening moments of his debut album, but he performs a similar ...

There may be no more unlikely act in indie/electronic music than a sunglasses-and-keffiyeh-wearing wedding singer with a chain smoker's gruff voice. But Omar Souleyman is no ordinary musical act; if anything, he's one of the most resilient performers you'll see on the summer festival circuit, whether it's at FYF ...

The sound of the Australian indie-pop band Alpine is so spare and meticulous, it's hard to believe it emanates from a six-piece group. While there's guitar, bass, keyboards and drums at play behind frontwomen Phoebe Baker and Lou James, Alpine builds its songs up harmonically, allowing its sound a ...

On the surface, punk and gospel might appear to be on different ends of the musical spectrum — one given to loud guitars, screams and nihilism, the other to solemnity, its sanctified voices professing the deepest of beliefs. One seeks to raze tradition, the other to embrace it. But as ...

In 1967, while still in The Byrds, David Crosby wrote "Triad" about a ménage a trois, inspired by the counterculture notion of "free love." It was left off the band's next album, The Notorious Byrd Brothers, and became a point of contention when Crosby left the band. Recorded ...

At the turn of the 21st century, computers began to audibly infiltrate musical realms far beyond the electronic and experimental spaces, cropping up in rock, indie-pop and more. One of the cagiest uses of the computer could be heard on The Books' winsome 2002 debut Thought For Food. There, the ...

The first sound you hear on Toro y Moi's fourth album is the buzz and roar of race-car engines on the speedway. For those who've followed Chaz Bundick since his debut album, 2010's Causers Of This, it's a peculiar sound. Bundick has never sounded like a man taken with ...

Last year brought the first album from Inventions, the duo of Explosions In The Sky guitarist Mark Smith and Eluvium's Matthew Cooper. Some collaborations can spring from left field, be it Lady Gaga with Tony Bennett or Kanye West with Paul McCartney. But ...

David Kennedy, the Leeds producer behind Pearson Sound, has been at the vanguard of British electronic music since his first singles (under another alias, Ramadanman) back in 2006. He's had a productive and popular career to date, a dozen singles credited to Pearson Sound and another dozen as Ramadanman, and ...

Pete Lawrie-Winfield's studio project Until The Ribbon Breaks frequently nods to celluloid, with cinematic references underpinning many of the British producer's gloomy tracks. Begun as a solo project while Winfield was still in film school (and providing his own soundtracks for his work), UTRB infuses its first single "Pressure" with ...

For the better part of the '00s, Manchester electronic producer Andy Stott shuffled through variations across the techno spectrum in numerous singles: tech-house, minimal, dub and more. But in between his 2006 debut and his 2011 EP We Stay Together, Stott's aesthetic (from the cover art to the tracks ...

Les Sins is the moniker that musician Chaz Bundick deploys when he's not performing as Toro y Moi. And while he's run the genre gamut in his best-known work — releasing chillwave-indebted pop, folk and rubbery funk over the years — it's as Les Sins that Bundick makes his ...

For a brief moment, Brad Laner's band Medicine seemed to encapsulate the '90s. Signed first to Creation Records and then to Rick Rubin's American Recordings, the shoegaze-y L.A. rock group made a cameo appearance onstage in the 1994 superhero noir The Crow, featuring Cocteau Twins' Elizabeth Fraser in a ...

It takes chutzpah to name your debut album after the seismic Eddie Kendricks song "Girl You Need A Change Of Mind," a seven-minute soul classic with an extended breakdown and build-up that made it one of the earliest disco records. But the lanky Brit Adam Bainbridge had a firm grip ...

When British musician, film composer and audio engineer Atticus Ross found his band 12 Rounds signed to Trent Reznor's now-defunct Nothing Records, it proved to be a windfall for both artists. While the 12 Rounds album Reznor helped produce was left unfinished, Ross soon found himself working within Nine Inch ...

The romance shared between the L.A. and Toronto-based couple Austin Garrick and Bronwyn Griffin is almost too good to be true: The two have been betrothed since they were in eighth grade. Garrick got his start producing hip-hop for the likes of Ghostface Killah, Redman and Foxy Brown in the ...

Singer-songwriter Lia Ices attracted a bit of attention for her 2008 debut, Necima, but it was 2011's Grown Unknown that exposed her to a wider audience. The album featured a duet with Bon Iver's Justin Vernon, yet it was the song "Love Is Won" that generated the most buzz: ...

Coming up in a small punk scene still has a place in a post-Internet world, even as blogs and music websites can instantaneously spread an underground band's sounds far and wide. When word about Tampa's Merchandise began to spread in 2012 thanks to the social-media success of albums like ...