Unless You Speak From Your Heart from Porcelain Raft on Vimeo.

Where I’m going with this (hey, look: me digressing. Imagine that) is that singer/guitarist Christian Wargo now has a new band, Poor Moon; they have an EP coming out on Sub Pop in March. Admittedly, the guy’s been keeping busy: he’s also a member of an obscure folk-rock outfit called Fleet Foxes. But as a fan of his work as a songwriter, I’m glad to hear that this group exists. The MP3 that Sub Pop has up now? Also pretty catchy.

At the show in question, I picked up their album Loose Jewels; more recently, I wrote about it for Dusted.

(Also: that video’s probably NSFW. If you are going to listen, you might want to have headphones on.)

With 2012 on us, I’ve begun contributing to The L Magazine. Most recently (as I write this, though I should have another piece up before long), I wrote about Scud Mountain Boys’ recent show at the Bowery Ballroom.

When I first started thinking about doing a zine in the mid-90s, two of the zines that inspired me most were Rumpshaker and Anti-Matter*. And pretty much since late last month, I’ve intended to use that as a point to link pieces by the editors of each: Eric Weiss’s interview with Carrie Whitney on the followup to her excellent All About Friends compilation**, and Norman Brannon’s essay “The Death of a Music Writer: A 20-Year Exit Strategy.” It’s always a fine thing when the writers who said smart, inspirational things about music (and why you should care about music) seventeen years ago are doing it just as much today, you know?

*-the third critically important zine for me growing up was Trustkill, for the record.
**-which featured Botch covering “Rock Lobster,” which was utterly awesome. See above.

At Vol.1, I’ve listed some of my favorite writing about music for the year.

And at Big Other, I talk about some of my favorite live music of 2011.

I also picked up Temporary Residence’s Bitch Magnet collection the other week at Sound Fix, and am slowly making my way through that. I’ll admit that I’d known of the group primarily as Sooyoung Park’s pre-Seam band; so far, I’m enjoying exploring their discography, which is heading to some unexpected places. (It’s also prompting me to revisit Seam’s body of work, which is never a bad thing.)

My ten favorite albums, along with some thoughts on the year in music, are now listed at Dusted.

And I contributed to a list of literary gift ideas at The Contextual Life, along with a number of notably NY-area lit folks.

All of this is preface to say that I chatted with Jóhannsson for The Rumpus via email over the course of a few months, and the end result is now online.

Handsome Furs, Sound Kapital:

Sound Kapital never quite settles into a comfortable pattern of pop. The first 15 seconds of opener “When I Get Back” feature slightly distorted vocals over a skeletal beat. Though it eventually settles into a more established dancefloor configuration, those first moments are intentionally jarring, the lines “When I get back home / I won’t be the same no more” serving as the album’s thesis statement.

The War on Drugs, Slave Ambient:

These are songs designed to be played in an archetypal car with its windows down, engine floored as it heads down the interstate. On the other hand, there’s a blissful quality — less psychedelic and more coming from the ambient/drone side of things. It’s not dissimilar to the devastatingly subtle boundary-ebbings practiced by the likes of Marissa Nadler and Sharon Van Etten.

A Winged Victory for the Sullen, A Winged Victory for the Sullen:

Unlike The Dead Texan, which flirted very loosely (and effectively) with pop structures, the seven pieces here are more impressionistic; while there are structures in place, the overall effect is one of contrasts, of quieter sections giving way to the presence of a host of instruments.