Amoeba.com has many of the bands playing at Coachella this weekend and next available digitally. Pick up some of the albums below before your drive out to the desert!

 

Dinosaur Jr. - Chocomel Daze (Live 1987)

Recently released live set from 1987 from the legendary college-rock band, in all their You're Living All Over Me glory.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Divine Fits - A Thing Called Divine Fits

A surprisingly strong side project featuring Spoon's Britt Daniels and former Wolf Parade/Handsome Furs barker Dan Boeckner.

 

Amoeba.com’s growing free downloads section had a ton of great stuff this year. Here are some highlights.

 

Sufjan Stevens – “Justice Delivers Its Death”

This delicate ballad comes from Sufjan Stevens’ latest Christmas opus, Silver & Gold, Songs for Christmas, though its delicate beauty would fit on any of Stevens’ early, more acoustic releases.

 

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Pissed Jeans – “Bathroom Laughter”

Pennsylvania punks Pissed Jeans’ latest album, Honeys, is due Feb. 12 on Sub Pop. The first taste from the album is a ferocious blast, with singer Matt Korvette scream-talking lyrics quickly as the band bashes out two-and-a-half minutes of hardcore bliss.

This is it, we're entering the hot season for new releases. Next week sees the release of new albums from Cat Power, Animal Collective and Deerhoof, to name a few. But plenty of great releases snuck up on us this week too; here are a few of my favorites:

Wild Nothing - Nocturne
 
Wild Nothing’s Gemini was a warm, digitally enhaned indie-pop love letter to its inspiration, college rock of the 1980s. Since that release, Wild Nothing’s Jack Tatum has had a couple of releases, the Golden Haze EP and the Nowhere single, that have further proven Tatum an equal to his forebears, and that continues with Nocturne, which sands down any outlier sounds and offers a solidified statement of purpose for Wild Nothing. As you might guess from titles like “Nocturne” and “Midnight Sound,” the album is full of swooning nighttime pop, with swirling, delayed guitars, lovelorn vocals and synth washes lapping underneath it all. While the album’s opening three songs (“Shadow,” “Midnight Song” and “Nocturne) set the tone thematically, the more you listen to Nocturne, the more the shier songs stay with you, like “This Chain Won’t Break,” with its freestyle beat and bassline a weirdly perfect fit to its twee synths and melodies, or “Paradise,” a glorious New Wave totem that sounds like whitewashed memories of an ’80s prom. However, Nocturne doesn’t fall into the trap of sounding overly reverential to the ’80s because Tatum’s songs have become more confident, as he pulls off a refrain like “only Heather makes me feel this way” on the Cure-ish “Only Heather.” Nocturne gets so many things right, with its sneaking melodies, dreamy guitar textures and dreamier lyrics are Tatum’s alone, that everything feels like inspiration rather than pastiche.