The girls of First Aid Kit were giddy as couple of little girls in a dress shop to be in San Francisco, and to be in American in general. As Klara herself says before busking on the docks of the Balcutha, “I don’t know how many times I’ve seen that bridge on TV…and then I’m HERE!”

Yours Truly welcomes you.

One week from today, Yourstru.ly and Blood Drank Magazine will host an evening of music and art at the 111 Minna Gallery in our fair city of San Francisco. You should really come because staying home would mean you’d miss Pure Ecstasy, SLEEP ∞ OVER, Young Prisms, and a DJ-set from oOoOO. I don’t wanna get pushy, but if I was your doctor,  your lawyer or your mother I’d probably sit you down, pour you a glass of milk and have an adult conversation covering the countless reasons why you should attend this event. Here’s a few reasons to get you started.

Pure Ecstasy – Dream Over (via)
SLEEP ∞ OVER – La Rose
Young Prisms – I Don’t Get Much
oOoOO – seaww (via)

Buy the Pure Ecstasy/Sleep Over split 7-inch from Light Lodge
Pre-Order the Sleep Over “Outer Limits 7-inch from Forest Family

Watch YT’s videos of Pure Ecstasy performing at Aquarius Records from awhile back…this show will be kinda like this, just 4x better

As our friends at Weekly Tape Deck already mentioned when they premiered this piece, “Angel goes from naive and almost nervous to resolute and singing with conviction.”

Creator, Destroyer

And as our pals at Delicious Scopitone said about this second piece, in their native tongue (can someone translate?)

Le temps, pourtant fugace, s’est soudainement suspendu à l’écoute d’Angel Olsen… Un vrai coup de foudre… Comme si quelque chose de cosmique venait de se passer. Indéfinissable. 50 ans venait de défiler en quelques minutes. Une rencontre que l’on voudrait voir s’éterniser. Heureusement, le brillant Yours Truly a su capter cet instant magique et nous le restituer en beauté. Silence, le rideau va se lever ! Angel Olsen entre en scène…

Some Things Cosmic

Thanks to Weekly Tape Deck and Delicious Scopitone for premiering these pieces, and to Angel for her grace.

The single most important quality in an emcee is honesty. Voice, melody, dexterity, personality, lyricism, sense of humor, songwriting ability, etc. are obviously inseparable from my enjoyment of the songs, but what compels me to really invest in an artist is authenticity. Honesty is especially important in hip-hop because of its narrative nature and the success of any narrator is dependent on his/her ability to earn the listener’s trust. I invest my trust carefully, but wholeheartedly, and when I give it, I usually let it go for life.

Huntsville, Alabama doesn’t strike me as the type of place that tolerates fakers. If you wanna rap than you’d better do you because a town that small won’t hide lies long. So if you’re selling drugs and rapping about it than that’s cool, just speak from experience, report your reality, and do so without compromise. If that ain’t you than that’s cool too, it’s just as real to rap and hold down a job as it is to rap and hustle and rob.

Case in point, DJ Cunta and Kristmas’ latest anthem Somebody is all about wanting to set a good example; to become “somebody without selling cocaine to somebody,” as Kristmas so plainly puts it in his country-fried and world-weary rasp.

Please don’t mistake this for some Quaker crusade against gangster rappers with criminal pasts. Some of my favorite emcees (Freddie Gibbs and Pill for example) rap about pushing dope, hustlin’ hos and getting money all day. But those dudes do so with a painter’s eye for detail and a reporter’s thirst for facts. Subject matter can change according to the narrator, what must stay consistent is the narrator himself, from the first drum beat down to the very last verse.

Much respect to Davey Boy Smith at Southern Hospitality for turning me on to this song.

“Burning” was filmed by Vincent Moon and Nathanaël Le Scouarnec at the Music Hall of Williamsburg in Brooklyn between the 27th-29th of April 2009.

Other People’s Poetry – Night Gallery

Night Gallery’s Constant Struggle is available via Rainbow Body Records August 10, 2010

front page image by Sebastien Bremer

Day 3 of the Pitchfork Festival was cloaked in clouds, like Eeyore himself had decided to dust off his cut-offs and bring the gloom behind him. Attempting to dodge the weather, YT took Here We Go Magic to a cluttered classroom atop the artist lounge. Safe from the rain but cemented in the slippery grip of humidity, the band graciously played through this arresting rendition of “Casual,” for Pitchfork.tv.

If Seattle’s The Head and the Heart had a singular purpose it would be to remind us to see the beauty in things, especially the sadness. Each song feels like the story of a soul standing at the threshold of one of life’s most difficult crossroads. Songs of love, loss and introspection unfold like thoughts, cycling through feelings of despair, hope and optimism, sometimes simultaneously. Textured harmonies, earnest piano and almost symphonic use of strings weave together layers of Americana that feel fresh and yet achingly familiar. Images of rocking on a rickety front porch, skipping ties along long forgotten train tracks and chasing fireflies with a punctured bell jar flash through the mind, while deeper lyrics pierce the heart.

Lost in My Mind moves like a freight train a chuggin,’ its jangly guitar and whooping “Whoo-hoos” filling up the landscape like cowboys and Indians.

Winter Song is a log-cabin ballad, with wilting harmonies and a finger-picked guitar that falls like rain on steamed-over windows.

Buy The Head and the Heart’s self-titled debut album from the band, here.

words by Katie Buono

A cacophonous collage of found footage underscores the smooth on the skin but brooding beneath the cells sounds of “Contemporary Individual” by upstart Angelenos, Superhumanoids.

It’s truly an honor to present the premiere of this Joel McWilliams created clip of my favorite song from the Superhumanoids‘ debut EP alongside a letter from one of the band’s songwriters, to his hero George Harrison. Before you read, listen to my 2nd favorite Urgency tune “Hey Big Bang.”

A thousand crayon-drawn thank you cards are in the mail on their way to Cults for turning YT on to Guards. Whatta you know, twitter is good for something! Just like Cults before them, not much is known about Guards other than the fact that they have a collection of tooth-ache sweet, common cold catchy, parallel universe pop available for free via bandcamp. The EP’s finale I See It Coming is actually a great starting point with it’s acoustic brush strokes, sha-sha sleigh bells, buried girlie harmonies and Arcade Fire Funeral-esque wordless chorus.

Waiting to see this whodunit unfold kinda gives me an idea…what if yours truly quit the blog biz and started up a mystery band detective agency…we could rent out a ripped up office in a forgotten part of town, smoke cigars, sip whiskey from flasks, and uncover the identities of all these amazingly anonymous bands on behalf of our classy dame clients…sounds like the future.

illustration by Andrew Bannecker