I recently had the chance to sit down with Slug of Atmosphere, aka Seven, aka Sean Daley, at his Uptown Minneapolis home, just before the release of his group’s highly anticipated new album. The undisputed reigning group of the Rhymesayer’s Empire and Twin Cities Hip-Hop, Atmosphere’s latest long-player, Seven’s Travels, was released this Tuesday to hordes of anxiously awaiting beat-heads.

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The men of Valet are teachers, taxi drivers and grad students. They are also—mostly on weekends and when their busy schedules allow—one of the best indie-pop bands to call the Twin Cities home. This isn’t news to local scenesters; the band’s been universally hailed in the local press since their formation and quick rise to prominence as Foxfire Coffee House regulars at the close of the ‘90s. However, after the fervor surrounding their self-released 2001 record The Glamour is Contagious died down, things got quiet in Valet land pretty quickly.

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Here’s one of the weirdest memories I have of my formative years: I remember watching MTV and seeing the video for INXS’s “New Sensation,” in which frontman Michael Hutchence (in suit, tie and ponytail) vamps at the camera with animated neon squiggles radiating from his head and a repetitive two-chord guitar part jangling in the background. For whatever reason, this spectacle left me with an intense feeling along the lines of “Wow, 1987 is soooo futuristic, and I’m lucky to be here.”

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Produced by Howard Hamilton (Saucer, The Busy Signals) and Matt Freed (Domo Sound), Electro-Pop outfit TELEPHONE! rox the mic with an infectious tale of modern infatuation!

Kid Dakota, the ongoing collaboration between local mainstays Darren Jackson, Chris McGuire, and producer Alex Oana, is back this week with a new album. Sorta. Of the eight tracks on So Pretty, being released on Low’s Chairkickers’ Music label, only three are new. They augment the five tracks that were previously released two years ago as the So Pretty EP; but they bring the total running time to over 46 minutes. Indeed, the newcomers are fairly epic compositions. They make for a good excuse to explore the guts of a very clever and original recording.

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The Size of Planets, is the kind of fully realized artistic triumph that usually takes musicians at least a few records and years to reach, the end result of relentlessly refining one’s artistic approach and finally clicking on all cylinders. It’s a subtle stunner of a record, effortlessly mixing bluesy Fender Rhodes-led vamps (“Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy”) with acoustic folk (“Am I Allowed) and gently rollickin’ country-tinged pop (“Drinking Again”)—and that’s just the first three tracks. Now for the shocker.

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“This band was kind of born out of loss,” explains Andy Allen, singer/guitarist for new Twin Cities outfit the Tin Horns. “We sort of all had lost sight of what we were doing and were having a hard time. Then we came together and this band was sort of the answer.” Coming together at a time when all of their previous projects were fizzling out, Allen and singer/bassist Dan Wenz (who had worked together for years in The Tide) found themselves joining forces with drummer B.J. Wuollet (formerly of the Stereo) and guitarist Casey Nelson (formerly of End Transmission) early last year. All involved immediately realized that moping over the demise of their former groups was no longer the order of the day.

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Seems like no matter how much he tries, Jay Farrar can't help sounding a little like himself. Farrar's new album, Terroir Blues, finds the 36-year-old artist and alt. Country icon striving to twist, undermine, explode and generally make strange the wonderfully atavistic sounds he has made since the beginning.

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Produced by Chan Poling (The Suburbs, Chan Poling Music), this all-star tribute to the Bowie-Lennon hit features *FAB* lead vox from Lolly Pop (TELEPHONE!) as well as Venus (All The Pretty Horses) and sports cameos from Al Bergstrom (Panda), Dr. Fink (Prince & The Revolution), Hugo Klaers (The Suburbs) as well as Bruce Allen (The Suburbs)!

The Weakerthans music is smart, not in a nerdy math-rock time signature kind of way either, but rather the sort of uncompromising flat-out literary smart that seems downright alien to most rock music. The fact that the band’s dense word play comes packaged in a folksy rock/pop-punk package makes it all the more intriguing.

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