• We’re sorry to report that Chris Feinstein, bassist and vocalist for Ryan Adams & The Cardinals, has passed away. Apparently, the 42-year-old was found at home in Manhattan. The cause of death is still unreleased. Beyond the Cardinals, Feinstein has worked with Moby, Santigold, Albert Hammond Jr., and many others.

• California indie pop band The Morning Benders have signed to Rough Trade. They’ll be releasing Big Echo, their sophomore album, produced by frontman Christopher Chu and Grizzly Bear’s Chris Taylor, in early March.

• KEXP has been spinning the excellent new GIVE Seattle 2009 compilation regularly — still looking for a holiday gift? it’s a gift that gives back to others! — and this week they’ve released a new video for the Head Like a Kite song “Director’s Cut,” featuring Tilson of The Saturday Knights.

• We mentioned it some time back, but now the James Mercer/Danger Mouse collaboration has a release date! The band, Broken Bells, will release their self-titled debut on the ninth of March.

• Lil Wayne’s Rebirth has been slated to be released, like, a million times. Technically only six, but still! That’s way too many. It was finally set to be released in February, but was accidentally sent out to more than 500 pre-ordering customers by Amazon! Ouch! Somebody’s a goner!

• Broken Social Scene member Jason Collett is generating buzz for his own next release, Rat A Tat Tat, due in March, by releasing the single “Love Is A Dirty Word” for free here.

• Florida band (and friends of Modest Mouse) Holopaw have asked 24 visual artists to respond to their new release, Oh, Glory. Oh, Wilderness, the results of which you can see now on their blog, and they welcome you to submit your own artistic interpretations as well.

• FM Belfast, one of the bands we were very excited to discover and feature during Iceland Airwaves this year has been remixed by another festival attendee Alaska in Winter. It’s a song you may have heard on one of Kevin Cole’s Music That Matters podcast:

• Fans of KEXP’s new metal show, Seek and Destroy, will likely already know that 80s thrash metal’s ‘Big Four‘ will be touring together next summer. This includes Metallica, Anthrax, Slayer, and Megadeth.

• Speaking of music that doesn’t often air on KEXP, the inductees of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame are interesting choices. The Stooges, ABBA, Jimmy Cliff, Genesis, and the Hollies make up the 2010 class of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Billboard reports. Nominees that didn’t make the cut include Kiss, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Donna Summer, and Darlene Love.

• Elliott Smith no doubt will have “new” tracks released posthumously for a long time to come, but that doesn’t mean I won’t be excited for each and every one of them! Kill Rock Stars will be releasing reissues of a couple of his albums on April 6th. “Cecilia/Amanda”, an unreleased solo track, will be available beforehand on the KRS website.

Hyaltalin performing at RUV Radio
photo by Scott Holpainen

Just before the week-long CMJ broadcast, KEXP was invited to cover the Iceland Airwaves festival in Reykjavik, where over 215 artists, the majority from Iceland, performed at venues around the city.

Iceland itself is a microcosm of a music scene; in a city of only 200,000, comprising two-thirds of the country’s entire population — which is itself just over half of Seattle’s population — there’s an inordinate number of bands… and all of them are great! Perhaps it’s due to an educational system that values the arts and provides most students have some form of musical training, or maybe it’s the cold weather and short winter days, but nearly every young person we met during the festival seemed to be in a band. Sure, it does seem like that in Ballard on most days of the week, and Williamsburg definitely has a high residency of musicians, but it’s hard to image a larger concentration of talent than in Reykjavik. And thanks to both the small location and the lingering punk aesthetic that demands that art always be new, the range of genres, styles and sounds is far more diverse than in much more dense populations. In other words, not everyone in Iceland wants to be Bjork or Sigur Ros. In fact, no one does!

As proof of Iceland’s wide range of fantastic music, we’ll be featuring videos of band performing in-studio, at venues, and even in their living rooms here on the KEXP Blog over the next couple of weeks. As part of our experience there, we broadcast six local bands the the national statjion, RUV Radio, four of which you can listen to and watch right now. Here’s Hjaltalín, FM Belfast, For A Minor Reflection, and Hafdis Huld, all about as different from each other, but whether it’s pop, orchestral-, post-, or electronic rock, it’s invariably great.

photos by Scott Holpainen:

Hjaltalín:

FM Belfast:

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