Give credit to Toronto's The Rural Alberta Advantage for its naming prowess: The group's songs are indeed about the advantages to living in rural Alberta. Neutral Milk Hotel, to whom the band often gets compared, never wrote songs about neutral milk or milk hotels...

There are many ways love can get you kicked in the shins. Stuart McLamb knows...

There were three Chapin Sisters—well, two sisters and a half-sister—before Jessica Craven...

Alan Palomo’s cell phone doesn’t seem to work. His voice fades in and out and disappears in cell phone static and T-Mobile reverb. There are beeps and clicks and oddly digitized sounds. Based on sheer technological prowess, this shouldn’t happen. Palomo plays electro-pop. His electronics should work. This is a man who has just purchased a Theremin, nature’s most complicated musical instrument, with money...

Matt Pond PA is no longer from PA, though after 12 years as a band, not much else has changed. And even that hasn’t changed much. Pond relocated his band from Philadelphia to Brooklyn seven years ago, so they’ve technically been Matt Pond NY for more than half their existence. But if you have a good thing going, why change it?

No one is entirely sure of the number of albums released by Jay Reatard and his bands. His record company says it's more than 90. Wikipedia places it somewhere around 60. Reatard isn't certain of the exact number, but says that Wikipedia's discography has some...

It’s easy to play a song imperfectly. Bands do that all the time, for lack of skill, for irony, or for utter lack of caring. Andrew Bird wants very much for the music in his live shows to be imperfect. He says that his live shows are perilous, on the brink of collapse. But “brink of collapse” better describes all those other, imperfect musicians...

They were the coke-snorting, trust-fund abusing, bastard grandkids of The Beatles—true libertines, influenced by The Libertines, with substance-driven frantic energy, skirt-chasing confidence and the too-cool-for-the-room sneer of disaffected youth. When NME named the Arctic Monkeys’ debut “the fifth greatest British album of all time,” the average age of the band members was 20...