Earlier tonight, sitting back while travel-delirious from an east/west cross-country flight, I queued up this, a new track from Tape Deck Mountain from their forthcoming EP, Secret Serf. One of my favorite local-ish discoveries of the past couple of years, the group’s EP, which drops next week, sets a great pace for TDM in 2011. [...]

Adam Thorn is a chameleon. After fronting Greensboro, North Carolina’s Kudzu Wish, a band that pulled from Hot Water Music, Jets to Brazil and other proto-emo indie rock, he slipped into his current, self-titled project, Adam Thorn and the Top Buttons, whose 2007 debut, Where’s the Freedom, was a focused genre exercise in 60′s mod-rock. [...]

Head isn’t the best Monkees album; in fact it contains just six pieces of music, only one of which is a copper-bottomed classic. But it does best symbolize the wonderful set of contradictions that made up the Monkees and their brief top-flight career. The Monkees were first really brought to my attention when my kid [...]