Aaron Detroit, Buyer at Amoeba Hollywood. As you may know, I've worked in Hollywood for 8 years, but started my time with Amoeba - way back in 1998 -  at the San Francisco store. This is my extensive list of 2011 releases that I fell in love with or had hot and heavy affairs with this year.

1. Wild Beasts Smother

In 2008, Brit quartet Wild Beasts released their shaky-legged -but- stunning debut, Limbo Panto. In the four years since, the band has released two thoroughly dazzling masterpiece full-lengths of deceptively delicate indie rock, lyrically bent towards looking in the dark recesses of the heart and libido, largely sung by co-vocalist Hayden Thorpe in his trademark falsetto. Smother finds the band adding a new restraint to their arrangements that allows the tension in the lyrics to hit with hair-on-end chills. It is a singular LP by a singular band that I expect will eventually reach a Radiohead-level stratosphere. 

April is turning out to be a fantastic month for music! I think some of my favorite albums of the year are probably going to be taken from this month and the next. Two of my fave bands, The Kills & The Raveonettes, both have new albums out April 5th! It is almost too much to handle at once -- too much of a good thing. It has been hard to decide which to listen to but I really have been hitting up both of these albums at least once every day; I even listened to the new Raveonettes album three times in one day! I can't get enough. The Raveonettes have already been around for 10 years, even though it seems like just yesterday that I first heard about them. Their first album, Chain Gang of Love, was released in the US in 2003. I still think they have one of the best names. They are dark and a bit spooky, like a Raven, and sometimes they sound like one of your old favorite girl groups from the 60s -- somebody with a band name that would end in "ettes." Raven in the Grave is the group's fifth album. Over the years I have liked all of their albums to varying degrees but this new album is something fantastic and I can't get the songs out of my head. There don't seem to be as many bands coming out of Denmark as there are from Sweden and Norway (where many of my favorites come from). I don't really get why. The Raveonettes are pretty much alone in being from Denmark...along with Mew and Lars from Metallica, I guess. I love this entire new album but I have my favorite tracks, of course. Here are two of them. If you have not yet fallen in love with The Raveonettes you simply should not wait any longer. The time has come...

Why wait for a perfectly round-numbered anniversary when you can bring together a line-up as commanding as only Matador can?

To celebrate the trusty indie rock label's 21st anniversary, a host of cooler than thou, kick ass artists will come together to rock in the glittering lights of Las Vegas this Oct 1-3 at the Palms!


Heavy stuff, no?

Answers to pretty much every question ringing through your over-stimulated mind, including when tickets go on sale, are available here.

With a new boom of appreciation for long-playing vinyl in full swing, our cozy dark corner of Amoeba Music Hollywood where the Goth /Industrial section lies is seeing lots of great titles come through. We’ve hand-picked some recent wax new releases and reissues and are featuring them in our section this month, so crank up your turntable for some of our highlighted dark wonders.

Sturmpercht Schattenlieder (Ahnstern)
3-sided double-LP in gatefold-cover with etched vinyl on the 4th side. The masters of Pagan Folk are back with their new album Schattenlieder - eine kleine Nachtmusik für Waldteufel und Berggeister. The album features 20 diverse and unique songs full of alpine mysticism, heathen legends and tales about strange fairies and pagan rites. Schattenlieder entrains you into deep forests, arcane mountains and dark chasms and guides you to hidden places in the depth of the central European forests, where hunters meet strange creatures from dusk til dawn. The album varies between gnarled songs about creepy fairies, catchy folk hymns and dark songs dealing with alpine myths, forest tales and hunter sagas. Schattenlieder is the perfect soundtrack for misty autumn evenings as well as for dark winter nights. The album features a large variety of instruments and sounds -- obscure, strange, folky, psychedelic, but always original and weird, in Sturmpercht's very unique way. Schattenlieder is completely unpredictable -- each track a standalone, but contributing to the overall ambiance of this new benchmark within the Pagan Folk genre. Not for everyone, but a truly bizarre and wonderful release!