1) Waxahatchee/brother bryan
Waxahatchee is a solo project of songwriter Katie Crutchfield formed after the breakup of P.S. Eliot. She released her first music as Waxahatchee as a split cassette with Chris Clavin on Plan-It-X Records. Her bedroom-recorded[2] debut album, American Weekend, was released on Don Giovanni Records in 2012.[3][4]

Katie has a twin sister Alison who also played in P.S. Eliot and The Ackleys with her.[5]

On June 11, 2012 "Be Good" was the song of the day on National Public Radio[6] as well as one of the best 50 songs of 2012.[7] Her debut album, American Weekend, was named a top album of 2012 by Dusted magazine.[8]

A second album, Cerulean Salt, followed in 2013.
in concerto con tegan e sara, in europa, dopo aver appena firmato con la wichita records.



-12/14 aprile coachella festival 

2) neneh cherry + afrika baby bam /nina

- Today, Swedish pop star Neneh Cherry shared a new track called "Nina". It's a collaboration with Afrika Baby Bam of the Jungle Brothers and it features production from Kieran Hebden, aka Four Tet. (Hebden previously contributed a remix to The Cherry Thing Remix EP). The press release also teases that Cherry and Hebden are working on a more "extensive" collaboration.

3)the oh sees/
http://www.castlefacerecords.com/
nuovo album appena uscito per la 


4)the mallard/
The Mallard are an inside-out-echo-laser-garage-psych-rock four-piece from San Francisco. Their home fried songs harness the naked abandon of 60's punk (think earliest syd barrett era pink floyd), but inject the form with a deranged spirit all their own. Close attention to texture and dynamics allow the band to explore unusual terrain – to grant access into unexpected realms of beauty and terror. . .with dessert.

In 2009, songwriter Greer McGettrick (guitar/vocals/drums) moved to San Francisco and began performing as The Mallard, self-recording an initial eight-song cassette tape (which would later catch the ear of one John Dwyer), and fronting the group through several incarnations, including a stint playing solo and drumming with her feet. In early 2011, she invited her friend Dylan Tidyman-Jones (guitars/keys/backing vox) to drum. They played shows for a while as a duo, including a west-coast tour. Their first full-length LP, Yes On Blood – again self-recorded by Greer – was released on Castle Face Records in February, 2012. Multi-instrumentalist Dylan Edrich (bass/guitar) came aboard, and as a three-piece they toured with Thee Oh Sees, including shows at SXSW, and recorded a video with Hannah Lew (Grass Widow). Miles Luttrell (drums) is the groups most recent addition. The Mallard perform frequently in the bay area, are soon to embark on full US tour, and have a host of record releases in the works. Hold onto your ears holes....



5)WAX IDOLS - GOLD SNEAKERS
discipline and desire 6 aprile per la slumberland records

Heather Fedewa/heather fortune
The jump from 2011's No Future to 2013's Discipline and Desire is a major upgrade, and a prime example of how collaboration can aid a band's output rather than hurt its creative process. Primary member and songwriter Heather Fedewa/Hether Fortune, at only 25, has already taken part in a handful of bands, been a dominatrix, dated a cult rock star (the late Jay Reatard), and developed enough confidence and self-assuredness to spew a stream of arrogance and "you don't get my art" arguments throughout her social media feeds. She carries herself with the cockiness and androgyny of a leader respectively beyond her years, and beyond traditionally-defined femininity. For someone so obscure, she's quite a somebody. And she is extremely self-aware.

It is with some nervous hesitation, then, that I dismiss her debut LP as Wax Idols for its amateur feel. Her history has solid range, from the campy Hunx and His Punx to the appropriately animated Castle Face residents Blasted Canyons. But No Future, which saw her play multi-instrumentalist on an album she'd had nearly all to herself, felt like a homemade project, perhaps even suited more for 90s-era Kill Rock Stars, and since she's come out and announced its tie to the deceased Reatard ("Gold Sneakers" is the love letter that could have been), I carry this opinion somewhat apologetically.

But music is art, and art is free to criticize once it's been released from the boundaries of personal expression and handed off to the public. And Discipline and Desire is a piece of art that finally realizes the potential of No Future. In the space between records, Fortune has gone and married (TV Ghost's Tim Gick), and she is presumably happy. Her new record is musically darker than No Future, which was somewhat ironically peppy and girly. Discipline's track order and pacing are well-thought out, and the production is polished, but it provides a tunnel of thick, smoky sound, rather than the dulled energy that tends to result from tidying up a recording. With a new set of musicians to boast, the band has gained depth and texture, and rather than wailing like one of the Soviettes, Fortune has found vocal maturity, her voice deeper and reasonably comparable to Siouxsie Sioux. Discipline and Desire is a proper album by a grown woman and perhaps one of the best in Fortune's catalog.


6)blasted-canyons-blood-on-the wall


7)charli xcx/cloud aura feat brooke candy
dopo tanti singoli fatti uscire nel corso dell'anno scorso di quest'anno la giovane e piuttosto precoce artista inglese, sforna finalmente un alburm dal titolo "true romance" con la iamsound records.
[ stripper and rapper brooke candy americana, che ha collaborato anceh con grimes,a proposito del la sua vita e le canzoni che si ispirano sempre a quello che è realmente, come donna che ama le donne ecc, e come stripper che è la sua fonte principale di guadagno dice:
Well, being a woman that likes women, I guess you could say I've derived inspiration and wanted to promote strong women my whole life. I'm all about women helping women. There aren't enough collaborations like there were back in the day. Remember that track "Ladies Night" with Missy, Angie Martinez, Da Brat, and Left Eye?

8)banks/
spulciando tra le nuove cose della iamsounds records ho ascoltato questo pezzo, nuovo singolo di Banks, 

9)rokia traoré/beautiful africa
The first thing you hear on Rokia Traoré's Beautiful Africa is a drum beat, unadorned. It only lasts a few seconds before the guitars wrap around it like a veil, but it still feels revealing, as though we opened the door on the music just a few seconds before it was ready for us. That thump and tap, in a rhythm a bit like Radiohead’s “Idioteque,” tells us a lot about the album that follows: This is a record that grooves but also invites the listener to come closer, to step into its space, be still and listen. Traoré and producer John Parish have captured this music in all its rhythmic grace with great intimacy, capturing each slide up the bass or thrum of the n’goni with direct clarity.

For music with such rhythmic body, precision in capturing the singular character of each sound is often beside the point. But Traoré’s music benefits immensely from it-- you can hear the way the her guitar twists around the other guitars and Mamah Diabaté’s dusty n’goni, and the sound sets this thicket of repeated, interlocking phrases inside the full-bodied rhythm section. The effect is of music that lives two rhythmic lives in tandem, and each one pushes the other, leaving her voice free to glide loosely over the top. Traoré’s past albums established her as a fine singer, but here, she feels more accomplished than ever, her voice bending around her words (sung mostly in Bamana) with flourishes of subtle vibrato.

Moreover, she’s developed the dynamic range of her singing and writing. “Sikey” and “Lalla” both offer slippery funk, but with two completely different feels, while “N’Téri” travels in time over its nine and a half minutes, from hushed and skeletal n’goni topped by some of Traoré’s most incredible, full-throated singing to a whirling, driving electric song. The final couple of minutes surge on a bed of beatboxing and roiling guitar. It’s an amazing performance, and a good contrast to the more concise and straightforwardly funky songs.

Traoré is from Mali, and her music carries many signatures of her homeland, from the n’goni to the language to the circular guitar figures, but her sound is fundamentally international, swallowing tradition and modernity whole to create a pop sound she can quite easily call her own. Being from her country means contending with the legacies of some of West Africa’s most internationally successful artists; at this point, I’d say Traoré fits comfortably alongside her forbears.
Rokia Traoré – Beautiful Africa (releasedate: D/A: April 9th)

“I really like rock,” says Rokia Traoré about her new album Beautiful Africa, “and it was because of rock that I wanted to play music, but I didn’t want to make rock and roll in the Western tradition … I wanted something that’s rock and roll but still Malian and still me.”

When she was growing up, an older brother used to play her Dire Straits and Pink Floyd. “It wasn’t all I listened to—I discovered jazz and blues with my dad, and Malian and other African music, and French chanson, but it was rock music that made me want to learn guitar.”

There are three guitarists on the album, John Parish, Stefano Pilia and Traoré herself, but though the record is constructed around rock riffs and sturdy bass work, it still has a distinctively West African feel, thanks to the genius of Mamah Diabaté on the n’goni, the ancient, harsh-edged African lute. It’s an instrument that Traoré has used in compositions throughout her career, and she argues, “I’ve used n’goni in classical music projects, and it goes with blues, or jazz, or rock and roll. It’s a great instrument!”

Traoré’s changes of musical direction usually start with “a sound that I imagine…a sound inside my head.” She didn’t want to imitate what other people had done “because I need to do what I imagine—that’s the reason I’m making music.” But she needed someone to help her create the sound that she imagined, and eventually decided on John Parish, the writer, guitarist, and producer who has worked with Tracy Chapman, Eels, and PJ Harvey. During the recordings “he just asked me to listen to things and make my choice.” The collaboration worked. “This is what I wanted to make. it’s even more than I imagined.”

The past year has been a quite extraordinarily productive period for Traoré. The Barbican invited her to wirte three wildly different new sets of music: the acoustic Damou (Dream), the often bluesy Donguili (Sing), and the rock- influenced Donke (Dance), in which she set out to show “three different aspects of Malian culture and my own personality.” She has toured Britain lately on the Africa Express train, collaborating with Damon Albarn as well as Paul McCartney and John Paul Jones, who joined her backing band for the London finale. And she has continued acting as well, with British and European performances in Toni Morrison and Peter Sellars’ much-praised theatrical/musical re-working of the Shakespearian story of Desdemona, for which she wrote the music.

The songs on Beautiful Africa are in the West African language of Bambara, as well as French and occasional bursts of English, and the often personal lyrics are concerned with Traoré’s thoughts on her own life, and on her tragically battered homeland. The album’s title track, built around the sturdiest rock riff on the album, is very much a love song to “battered, wounded Africa,” and reflects Traoré’s despair and fury at what has happened to her country. “The flood of my tears is in full spate, ardent is my pain,” she sings, while arguing that, “Conflict is no solution…Lord, give us wisdom, give us foresight.” Other songs on the album include the thoughtful ballad “Sarama,” a praise song to Malian women, partly sung in English, and the personal “Mélancolie,” a surprisingly upbeat song about loneliness and sadness that has already become a radio hit in France. Traoré says that she was lonely as a child, partly because her father was a diplomat and constantly on the move. Another, more upbeat song, “Sikey,” is also autobiographical, looking back at the criticism she received when she first set out to become a professional musician, after all, she was not a griot, from a family of traditional musicians, but the daughter of a diplomat. And although she had no musical training, she gave up her studies in Brussels to return to Mali to create a new form of music, in which her songs would be backed by her acoustic guitar, along with n’goni and the xylophone-like balaba balafon, two instruments not normally played together in Africa.

Traoré, Parish and Stefano Pilia play guitars on the album, with Nicolai Munch- Hansen on bass, percussion from Sebastian Rochford (Polar Bear), ‘human beatbox’ effects from Jason Singh, and n’goni playing and backing vocals by fellow Malian musicians Fatim Kouyaté and Bintou Soumounou, both members of the Foundation Passerelle that Traoré established in Bamako, the Malian capital, to help her fellow Malians prepare for careers in music and sustain the growth of Mali’s rich musical culture.

It is difficult to think of anyone else who can switch from ancient Malian culture to acting and then to African rock and roll. She will be touring Europe in May and June presenting her album Beautiful Africa during a run of summer festivals, including Glastonbury and Roskilde.

10/rilo kiley


11)kate boy