Out This Week 9/27

Another great week for new releases... Wilco tops the must-buy stack with their latest, The Whole Love, the band’s eighth album and first to be released on their own label, dBpm Records, with distribution by Anti- Records (in other words, it’s all very creator-controlled). Some critics are calling it their best since 2002′s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Our own Music Director, Don Yates, calls it “a wide-ranging, often-thrilling set encompassing edgy prog-rock, bouncy power-pop, atmospheric ballads, melodic folk-pop and more, with a richly textured sound featuring a colorful variety of instrumentation on expansive songs with often surprising arrangements.” Sub Pop gropu Dum Dum Girls‘ second album is out today, and it’s an impressive leap toward a more confident and produced sound (but not overly so). Lyrics often dealing with frontwoman Dee Dee’s recent loss of her mother are counterbalanced with brighter, muscular melodies. Boise, Idaho’s Trevor Powers debuts his project, Youth Lagoon, on Fat Possum Records. Don Yates calls the the 22-year old’s effort “a remarkable album of lo-fi bedroom dream-pop, featuring a heavily reverbed sound that accents the frailty and loneliness in his high, boyish vocals on a consistently stunning set of songs, with many of them beginning as stark and intimate piano-based ballads before gradually building into huge-sounding, intricately detailed, emotionally cathartic epics of anthemic pop.” Nice. Also, Berlin-based DJ/producer Apparat, a.k.a. Sascha Ring, returns with his fourth album, “a more song-oriented approach that focuses on atmospheric, deeply emotive electro-pop ballads.”

As their songs prove, The New Division aren’t afraid to wear their influences on their sleeves (or in their name). Channeling New Order, Joy Division, Depeche Mode and others, the Riverside, CA, band sounds a bit at times like other 80′s synthpop imitators like Cut Copy on their debut LPShadows, which also hits stores today.

You can also fill your shopping cart with other excellent new releases from charming Canadian songwriter Dan Mangan, country chanteuse Nikki Lane, old-school cowpunks The Mekons, Sweden’s electronic duo Pallers, Crayon Fields’ frontman Geoffrey O’Connor (playing solo), Icelandic songwriter Sóley, Brooklyn’s Twin Sister, and many others.

Check out Largehearted Boy’s list for the full list and check out these great track here: