Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jcbehm

Get a fresh pair of pants ready because Pitchfork, self-established mecca of indie hipsterdom, has announced their initial lineup for 2010.

The first round of bands includes Pavement, Modest Mouse, LCD Soundsystem, St. Vincent, Here We Go Magic and Sleigh Bells. According to P4K, this year Friday’s lineup will feature more bands, which is always rad considering the Friday lineup alone is usually worth the ticket price. The bill – usually reserved for indie legends like last year’s Built to Spill, The Jesus Lizard, Yo La Tengo, and Tortoise – includes Modest Mouse, with more TBA.

The festival will be held once again at Chicago’s Union Park on July 16 – 18.

3-day passes are on sale now for $90.  One-day passes run $40 each. Buy them here.

Royal Bangs released their second album last summer, Let It Beep. It’s a great record, but you really have not experienced Royal Bangs fully until you see them perform live. One of the best up and coming live bands hit up Cincy tonight, and oh yeah, did I mention that it’s free? Thats right, tonights gig is free, which means you have no excuse to miss out. And get there early to catch openers Life Like. Check them out more with a download below.

Royal Bangs – My Car Is Haunted
Life Like – Pilot Light

The vid features Fred Armisen from Saturday Night Live fame and takes place at Women and Women First, “the most feminist of all feminist book stores.”

Enjoy this new video from St. Vincent.

St. Vincent – “Laughing With A Mouth Of Blood”

st. vincent | MySpace Music Videos

And don’t forget that St. Vincent is a part of this years MusicNOW festival, March 30-April 1. I’m told that the pre-sale tickets are being snatched up quickly, so get yours now!

MusicNOW Tickets

Our MusicNOW Retrospective

And sure, the harmonies are really a nod to Brian Wilson and the sound he is most known for, but to simply stamp that label on a group like The Besnard Lakes and walk away is really not fair at all. Their 2007 album, …Are The Dark Horse was just that, a underdog type of record that gained quite a following over time. The record seemed to reward fans for patience as it payed off in a big way if you actually took the time to listen to it and discovered all it had to offer.

And now here we are in 2010, and The Besnard Lakes are back. Although this time, they won’t creep up and surprise, but instead are placed on the crowded shelf along with other bands we fell for and then were disappointed by when they followed that effort. However, I’m here to tell you right now, that not only is the new album from The Besnard Lakes not a disappointment, but it’s an album that very well could separate them from the underdogs and push them to the front of the pack.

All the things that made the last album great are present, but there is an epic quality to tunes like “Like The Ocean, Like The Innocent” as it builds and crescendos and then builds right back again. The press release claims the album is more Dennis Wilson than Brian, and I tend to agree after repeated listens. It just carries that quality that makes me want to hear it again, and again. And in this age of new music every minute to distract the listener and create a fickle attention span, ..Are The Roaring Night makes me want to put on the LP and only move to turn it over when it’s done playing.

The album gets an official release from Jagjaguwar Records on March 9th, but you can listen to and download the excellent song “Albatross” right now.

The Besnard Lakes – Albatross

RJD2 used to hail from just north of Cincinnati in Columbus, Ohio and always makes a few stops back in the midwest when he goes out on tour. Joining him for this show is another Ohio musician that is pretty well known for his role in the band Howlin Maggie in Happy Chichester.

Based on what we have heard from The Collossus, this is going to be a really fun show and you have no excuse to miss it. But just in case you were thinking about bailing due to lack of funds, we have a 2 pairs of tickets to give away here on ENS. Send an email to enscontests at gmail dot com with the subject line reading “RJD2 TICKETS.” We will draw a winner and notify you by the end of the week, please only enter if you can attend the show on Saturday. Good luck!

RJD2 – Games You Can Win

On Friday, February 12 at the Carnegie Visual and Performing Arts Center in Covington, Kentucky, the Greater Cincinnati creative community will come together for “Rise Up Haiti,” a fundraising celebration to help end child slavery in Haiti.

There are approximately 300,000 children living in slavery in Haiti, where they are known as “Restaveks.” All funds raised at “Rise Up Haiti” will go to ending this practice. “Rise Up Haiti” will feature a unique collaboration of music and visual arts, with four local bands performing live, a photography exhibition with actual images of Haitian child slaves, and a silent auction of 10commissioned, one-of-a-kind pieces done by area artists.

The photography exhibition will feature the works of Jonathan Robert Willis, and his touching personal expression of beautiful Restavek faces. The concert will include Ric Hordinski, Rob Fetters, Kim Taylor and Me or the Moon. The silent auction will present a lively artistic range of views of hope and inspiration, spoken through the artists’ original talents.The event will also feature a full cash bar. All proceeds benefit the Jean Cadet Restavek Foundation, dedicated to abolishing child slavery in Haiti. For more information about the founda-tion, check out Restavekfreedom.com

MORE INFO ABOUT BUYING TICKETS HERE

The PM crew and ENS are teaming up to bring you all the music from “Milling About”, available for free download. So if you really liked the songs that were played an episode, you can grab em all here afterwards! If you have yet to subscribe to the podcast do so here. For now though, here is a brief recap of the episode along with all those songs available for you to download.

Show description…..

Your hosts Ken and Mandy, along with the peanut gallery (Ben & Yusef) discuss the Hollywood Foreign Press, weigh in on the IPad and get unnecessarily nostalgic. Featuring music from Pavement, Mystery Jets, Best Coast and She & Him.

Pavement – Gold Soundz

Mystery Jets – Young Love (Shoes Remix)

Best Coast – When I’m With You

She & Him – In The Sun

One of the most sought after musicians in the Cincinnati area has to be Reuben Glaser. In addition to fronting one of our favorite bands in the area in the last decade, Pearleane, Glaser has found himself contributing in small and big ways to several other notable albums to come out of the Queen City in recent years as well. So we are really pleased to report that Reuben is continuing to create, and has some new music to share.

In Reuben’s own words, the new music is being dubbed The Bellevue Project because most of it was recorded in his basement in Bellevue, Kentucky. The new material is really different from what you might be used to hearing from Glaser, but it’s really exciting as well. A six song EP is starting to make the rounds among friends in the area, and we are happy to bring you two of the new songs here on ENS today.

Reuben’s signature voice is familiar of course, but the sounds surrounding him sound more like TV On The Radio than the blues infused thickness you might be used to from Pearlene. I’ll let you decide though, enjoy these two new songs.

The Bellevue Project – Maybe It’s Nothing
The Bellevue Project – Roach Motel

To add another notch to the belt of one of the finest pop bands in Cincinnati, they guys are putting their debut album,Everything Is Alive out on vinyl in March with help from Broken Circles Records. Yep, on March 5th, the Pomegranates will be doing a special Vinyl Release show at Southgate House in Newport. This is exciting for fans of the band and of the vinyl format of course, and it’s also another reason to celebrate one of our favorite bands in Cincinnati.

Pre-orders start on February 26th, as stated in the poster above, and it will come in black, red or green wax. Pretty exciting!

We speculated last year about the new record, but now that the date has been announced, what can we expect from the album? Well, the official press release doesn’t really give too many details other than the tour dates and that the record will be out in May. So what songs can we expect on the new disc? The guys have been testing out several new songs in the past year or so, here are a few we are almost certain make the cut.

“Blood Buzz Ohio” “Love Buzz, Ohio” – This is a song that has been part of the live setlist at most shows in the past 8-12 months. The guys played it as headliner during the Pitchfork Festival last summer and you can watch some video of the song being performed below. - Odds it ends up on the new album 5/2 -

Here are some unconfirmed lyrics as well.

I was carried to Ohio in a storm of bees
I never married but Ohio don’t remember me
I still owe money to the money to the money I owe
I never thought about love
When I thought about home
I still owe money to the money to the money I owe
The floors are falling out from everybody I know

“Big Red Machine” – This tune has actually already been recorded and released as a part of the Dark Was The Night compilation last year, but I think there is a chance a new version of it ends up on the new album. Justin Vernon (Bon Iver) and Aaron Dessner are credited on the compilation, but Matt took the stage to perform the tune with Justin last year at Radio City Music Hall during the Dark Was The Night concert. – Odds it ends up on the new album 12/1 -

“Vanderlye, Cry Baby Cry” – Another live set staple in recent months, I’m not sure if this title is “Vanderlye Cry Baby” or “Vanderlye, Cry Baby Cry” but I have seen both out there on the web. And some are calling it “Vanderlylle” but I’m not in agreement on that. Here is a live performance of the song, what do you think the song title is? Also, in the video, check out Bryce playing this guitar with a bow. - Odds it ends up on the new album 3/1 -

“The Runaway” - Maybe my favorite new tune in the bunch, this not only has a confirmed title but also a really great recording and video to go along with it. The National performed the tune during a session with Studio Q in Canada. It was untitled at the time, but has since been confirmed as “The Runaway.” - Odds it ends up on the new album 5/2-

***UPDATE*** Here are some words from Matt regarding songs on the new album.

Pitchfork: Can you name any of the songs that will be on it?

MB: It’s hard to tell because we’re still going to chop some. One of the contenders is “Love Buzz, Ohio”. There’s one called “Romantic Comedy”, there’s one called “L.A. Cathedral”, there’s one called “Quiet Company”, and there’s one called “Runaway”. There’s a bunch that are untitled. There’s a few that we’ve played live before. Most of those will make it, but I think we’re still going to chop a couple of songs, and we don’t really know which ones we’re going to chop yet.

For a long time, we thought “Love Buzz, Ohio” was going to be a big, important song on this record, but just last week we were all thinking maybe it doesn’t even belong on the record. It’s so weird how quick we shift around the idea of what kind of record this is going to be. That song has had the potential to be good, but we just haven’t found it yet. We haven’t quite found its heart yet. But now we’ve jumped in and out of it and have done a few things, maybe stripped it way back.

It’s also going to be interesting to see if any of the bands friends turn up on the new release. We already know the Dessners have a list of friends that reads like a Pitchfork Best New Music archive. So who would you like to see the band collaborate with on this record? St. Vincent, Sufjan Stevens, Bon Iver, Dirty Projectors, David Byrne or maybe Joanna Newsom? Well, it’s possible. Below are the tour dates announced yesterday, the pre-sales are already running so get em fast!

The National U.S./Canada Tour:

APR 22-23: Richmond, VA @ The National Theater
MAY 6: London, England @ Royal Albert Hall
MAY 7: Paris, France @ Le Zenith (w/Pavement)
MAY 9: Berlin, Germany @ Astra
MAY 22: Los Angeles, CA @ The Wiltern
MAY 23: San Diego, CA @ Spreckels Theater
MAY 27: Oakland, CA @ Fox Theater
JUN 02: Boston, MA @ House of Blues
JUN 5: Philadelphia, PA @ Electric Factory
JUN 6: Washington DC @ DAR Constitution Hall
JUN 8: Toronto, Ont. @ Massey Hall
JUN 16: New York, NY @ Radio City Music Hall