The Easy Gramophone ft The Shaky Hands

1. The Shaky Hands - The Sleepless
Portland's Shaky Hands take the yelp-rock that's decidedly au-courant, and to it add romanticism, warmth, ladylike swoons. It's the same goofy charm that made Weezer more attractive than Green Day, but this time applied to Clap Your Hands Say Yeah's indie-boy twitches. These are hipsters you'd take home to your girlfriend; lads who The Shins might hire to play a wedding.
Download at: http://www.holocenemusic.com/shakyhands/

2. Ash Reiter - Elko (Song 1)
The artist known formerly as Drunken Boat does not sound very drunk. She mumbles with a lovely American drawl, stumbles here and there on her cheap acoustic guitar, but otherwise the only sign of intoxication is the generosity of the melody. It offers us almost too much beauty, this song; like a woman bending and showing off her décolletage. "Mmmm-mm-mm," she hums, as if a folk-song can tie two lovers together - in spite of everything.
Download at: http://drunkenboatband.com/Songs/index.html

3. Iran - We Could Go Away for a While
We Could Go Away for a While is a song that barely holds together. Aaron Aites' vocals are gentle and folky - and somewhere in there is a pretty guitar-line, - but every bar is interrupted by a shriek of noise, a distorted buzz, a digital aberration. It's like Sonic Youth with a slow-breaking heart; Nick Drake caught in an overloaded amp.
Download at: http://scjag.com/mp3/do/wecouldgoawayforawhile.mp3

4. Andrew Bird - Heretics
He's a Chicago fiddler-songwriter with a lazy tongue, and what he lacks in enunciation he makes up for with syncopation. Andrew Bird's lyrical opacity isn't quite at the level of Stephen Malkmus but there's a similar swagger in his stanzas. Bird eschews electric tangents and instead chooses swoops and sweeps of strings, gathering everything together for a light-touched chorus - like Patrick Wolf without any hangups or pretensions whatsoever.
Download at: http://www.andrewbird.net/listen.htm

5. Rosie Thomas and Sufjan Stevens - The One I Love
An REM cover recorded in-studio for the American net-radio station WOXY. Rosie's voice is, as ever, mesmerising, and twinned with Sufjan the result is almost certainly *too* pretty. While with REM there was something troubled in the song ("the one I left / behind"), here all is smoothed into sad loveliness - smothering as a blanket of rose-petals. And yet it probably won't stop you from listening, and listening, and listening again.
Download at: http://www.eachnotesecure.com/nothing-but-new-on-woxy/