Sound of the City writes:

Glaswegian producer Rustie (born Russel Whyte) makes huge dance tracks that are helping define a new maximalist, everything-goes ethos in electronic dance music. The basement of Santos Party House, where he headlined the Shortcuts party last night, is relatively tiny. This resulted in people new to the space, but familiar with Rustie's work, inspect its close walls quizzically, seemingly wondering how so much sound was going to fit into such a small space.

Sound of the City writes:

I've never had 500-plus people in the palm of my hand, but I imagine it must be a powerful feeling. Every eyeball fixated on you, every pair of hands waiting for you to stop singing so they can clap. At this point in their careers, Beach House's members should be no strangers to this feeling, yet their sheer charisma makes it seem like a brand new feeling for them. At the Bowery Ballroom—during a show celebrating the release of their gorgeous fourth album, Bloom—the band unleashed sound and fury and a lot of bright lights.

Brooklyn Vegan writes:

M Ward roped in Monsters of Folk collaborator Conor Oberst (who just announced a Carnegie Hall show) during his appearance at Webster Hall on Friday (5/11) to play "Vincent O'Brien", his second encore of the evening. The show, which featured an appearance from the Lee Ranaldo Band as part of a string of dates that they're on together, was the kick-off to a set of East Coast dates and one of two appearances in NYC that day (he also performed at Late Night with David Letterman which aired that night).

NYC Taper writes:

As with artists like Horseback, Liturgy, and particularly frontman and founder Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, refuse to hew to genre conventions, instead using black metal as the underpinning for their aesthetic while engaging in formal experimentation. Perhaps because of this, Liturgy find themselves the only metal band playing the Pitchfork Festival, the only metal band on Thrill Jockey, and – it can’t be avoided – the only black metal band that has ever appeared on this site. Sharing a stage with Vampire Weekend and sharing a label with bands like Tortoise and Matmos is apparently not much of a cred booster in the black metal scene. But political bullshit aside, just throw the band’s last record, Aesthetica, on your turntable or iThing, and dare to say it isn’t stunning.

Sound of the City writes:

Beach House didn't entirely disappear from the cultural consciousness, but they did go hide out for a while. The Baltimore duo of Alex Scally and Victoria LeGrand toured the hell out of their last record, Teen Dream, before heading back home to write Bloom (Sub Pop), which comes out tomorrow. Even their Twitter account (the frustratingly hard to remember @BeaccchHoussse) fell dormant for about a year. After a seven-week recording period in Texas, the band had a hell of a collection on their hands: 10 songs that weave in and out of themes like death, life, and that moment, so very small, of truth.

Sound of the City writes:

Like a lot of panel discussions about art, Saturday's Silent Barn Public Meeting #2—a talk and concert sponsored by the currently on-hold DIY space in the carpeted and wood-paneled upper room at Ridgewood's Gottscheer Hall—had a lot of talk about community engagement. Unlike a lot of arts panel discussions, however, the community was actually there to talk back. In a way, it's a mark of success: here are a dozen young arts entrepreneurs basically spinning theoretical yarns about how, eventually, they'd love to involve people from the community in what they do. As it turned out, the community was already there. And they didn't always appreciate being talked about like some foreign body, loosely orbiting the artistic world.

Sound of the City writes:

Kid Millions is juggling a shitload of action. The drummer extraordinaire just played another epic gig this past weekend with Oneida, the psych-rock jamming savants he's anchored since 1997. Man Forever, the bohemian collective of shape shifters he's united to realize his percussive-based spiritual vision, releases Pansophical Cataract (Thrill Jockey) this week; the group is also making killer videos and even throwing a hilarious, but dead serious, contest where you can actually be a member, at least for one performance.

NYC Taper writes:

We have featured Cymbals Eat Guitars several times on this site (most recently, a headlining Bowery show from last year), and we have always found their willingness to take risks refreshing. Not content to simply rework the more poppy sound of their breakout album, Why There Are Mountains, the band remain unafraid to take things in a more caustic direction. This Bowery Ballroom show found the band opening for Cursive (which we recorded, and will post if the band gets back to us about approval…), but the packed house for their set suggested equal fervor for these Staten Island natives.

Stereogum writes:

Animal Collective, who recently delivered new tunes "Honeycomb" and "Gotham," just announced the name and release info for their next album via a 90 second video. The collection's called Centipede Hz and it's out in September on Domino.

NPR Music writes:

These lifers still unleash the slow-mo headbang of a thousand metalheads on their first album together in 17 years. For a life-unaffirming album appropriately named after a downer, Lillie: F-65 should be swallowed whole.