Amoeba Music is proud to present Patrick Watson at the Bootleg Theater in Los Angeles on Friday, June 8th at 9pm!

Patrick Watson first broke through to audiences in 2006 with his album Close to Paradise. The album went gold in Canada and won numerous awards, including the Polaris Prize. It saw international release in September of 2007 and has since sold over 100,000 copies worldwide. His core four-piece band began to take shape in the wake of the self-released Just Another Ordinary Day in 2003, and before long buzz on their live show had lead to performances with an impressively diverse group of artists, from Phillip Glass and Steve Reich to Feist.

Watson's latest album, Adventures In Your Own Backyard, was just released May 1, 2012 on Domino Records, and was recorded entirely in his Montreal apartment after a whirlwind five-year tour. The result is an album that is still ripe with the touchstones one has come to expect from Patrick Watson and his collaborators, but permeated with a greater sense of patience and confidence. It's an attempt by Watson and the band to simplify their sights—to make music a bit more close to home in every sense of the phrase.

Record Store Day is great for any number of reasons — supporting record stores and the music community, hearing DJ sets from the likes of Broken Social Scene’s Brendan Canning. But in the end it’s all about the exclusive and new releases. Here are 10 picks from the many releases coming out April 21. (Read a more comprehensive list here, and download the full list here.)
 
Animal Collective – Transverse Temporal Gyrus
 
Ripped from elsewhere on the Amoeblog: In March 2010, Animal Collective and visual artist Danny Perez put on an installation called "Transverse Temporal Gyrus" at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. For the audio, each member of the band made individual sounds and songs. Over the course of two 3-hour performances, the basic tracks were fed into a computer program that randomized the track order, and sometimes randomly combined stems from one track with stems from another. The program also panned the music in various directions around a 36 channel surround sound system that ran through 36 speakers set up from the top of the Guggenheim's ramp to the bottom. The music on this 12" is a collage made consisting of the original tracks, as well as live recordings made inside the Guggenheim before the doors were opened to the public. It will be the only physical format on which any of the music will be released.
 
Plus it’s new Animal Collective!
 
Arcade Fire – Sprawl II
 
Arcade Fire’s Blondie-ish “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)” was undoubtedly the highlight of The Suburbs and showed the band still has some tricks up its sleeve. The Soulwax remix included here tastefully gives it the dancefloor feel it calls for without just throwing a house beat over the song and calling it a day.
 

Mastodon have just unveiled a brand new video that captures the much-revered metal band in their best setting - live in concert and killing it on the song "Dry Bone Valley" which is the second single from the band's critically acclaimed Mike Elizondo-produced album The Hunter - the band's fifth studio album that was released by Roadrunner Records via Reprise/Warner in late September.

This is the second video for this song: the first been the Tim Biskup created music video (see below). The above live video of the song was recorded at the Atlanta, GA band's recent sold-out show at London's Brixton Academy on February 11th.  The new video arrives just in time for diehard Mastodon fans (and there are many of those!) who have been anxiously awaiting their anticipated 2012 North American tour that kicks off this week featuring the super-skilled hard rock ensemble's Troy Sanders (bass guitar/vocals), Brent Hinds (guitars/vocals), Bill Kelliher (guitars), and Brann Dailor (drums/vocals).

The new US/Canada tour begins tomorrow night (04/04) in Portland, ME and ends on May 12th in Atlanta, GA. Unfortunately for Cali fans the hectic tour, with co-headliners the Swedish progressive metal band Opeth plus opening act Ghost (who are well worth checking out), includes only two Golden State dates so if you don't already have them, so get tickets now. Those two Cali dates are just three weeks away: Thursday April 26th in LA at the Gibson Amphitheatre and the following night (Friday April 27th) at the Fox Theatre in Oakland.  Pick up Mastodon's The Hunter in each of the three Amoeba Music stores on directly from the online Amoeba.com shop.

Beyond the live music lineup, Noise Pop 2011 boasts a great line up of film screenings and related events this year!

 

First will be the world premiere of This is Noise Pop on Feb 23, a documentary about indie rock via bands' Noise Pop appearances, followed by a Q&A with the director, editor and Noise Pop glitterati.

Also screening is a documentary about the ever-popular Jose Gonzalez called The Extraordinary Ordinary Life of Jose Gonzalez on Feb 23 and Look at What the Light Did Now, a film about Feist on Feb 24. Little Wings, the original author of the song "Look at What the Light Did Now," will perform after that film.

The much-anticipatedFamily Jams, a film by Kevin Barker about the 2004 tour of (formerly) San Francisco's own Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsom and Vetiver will also screen on Febuary 24.

Sure to be a popular seller at Amoeba this winter, the Feist documentary Look at What the Light Did Now will be released on DVD December 7th and it will come with a 13-track bonus CD. Like any good DVD, there will be extras as well, stuff not included in the film's theatrical release -- unseen footage, music videos, a collection of short films and more! In the meantime, you can still catch screenings of the film in Berkeley and around the world.

Watch Feist perform the title track with its original (in all ways) author, Kyle Field, aka Little Wings: