Francois Virot is a ridiculously busy guy. He's one of those artists that needs to stay busy and constantly find new ways to make music and be creative. When he's not out on the road or making records with his other band, Clara Clara, he finds time to fiddle on his own and that's where his solo record Yes or No comes into play.

Fever Ray, aka Karin Dreijer Andersson, better known as the girlie half of The Knife has just released her debut self-titled album and strangely enough it sounds like err...The Knife. Well sort of, if the knife were on lithium and listened to a lot of downtempo records. Fever Ray is a slow, methodically distant record that's as bleak as the winter sky and as dark as Sweden in the winter.

Tennessee's Framing Hanley have evolved from their humble beginnings in 2005. Named after a close friend who died in a car accident, the band began to take off around 2006 and with the help of former Creed bassist Brett Hestla solidified their place by being picked up by the Silent Majority Group in 2007 and recording their debut album at the end of 2008.

DAT Politics are a French laptop/electronic pop group that have been around for ages and are used to making music that could literally cause your brain to bleed. But as fate would have it, they some how found their way to their local disco recently and have yet to go home.   While there, they've...more been using their laptops and the tunes they come up with on them to conquer most of Western Europe and have now set there sights elsewhere. Armed with an electronic battle weapon that goes by the name Mad Kit this shouldn't be to difficult.

One of the most recognizable names in electronic music to this day is Paul van Dyk. This DJ/producer over the last decade has worked with just about everyone under the sun, in every genre known to man, and come up with some of the most absolutely blinding tunes that continue to pack dance floors...more from Miami to Ibiza and back again. To say that his  albums are epic trance excursions that are filled with one floor filler after another is an understatement; And that's just his original stuff; never mind all the remixes over the years. Well like a gift from the gods of Trance, Paul van Dyk has rounded up fifteen of those remixes and compiled them into one massive double disc set.

It's been nearly a year since the release of Le Pop 4 but it's not like the fine folks at Le Pop Musik have taken the year off. Oh no, they've been hard at work putting together another volume of the series that features only the most fabulous French pop on the planet. As this compilation...more demonstrates, the Nouvelle Chanson has continued to gain ground and there are so many great records coming out of France now it's almost impossible to keep up. What's a fan of the genre who doesn't exactly have easy access to French records to do? Well, picking up Le Pop/Les Filles is a brilliant start.

Shahrokh Sound Of K., who consists of Sharhrokh Dini and Andreas Kohler, are artists who want to put the music back into house music. Convinced that the music they love has been taken away from them and made so soulless that it's barely listenable they decided to do something about it. That's where...more Shahrokh Sound Of K. comes into play. Their album, Dripping Point, is an organic house record that sounds as if it were being performed in a small underground club that's dark, smoky, and seductively cool.

For their 300th release, Compost Records has decided to blow the dust off of the Freshly Composted series and release a third volume. This time around the disc contains thirteen tracks that are a mixture of previously released tunes and unreleased gems that have never appeared on CD. In fact, nine...more of the thirteen tracks are appearing on CD for the first time and that alone makes Freshly Composted Volume Three worth having.

Circle Research are a team of mad scientists who dig through crates and crates of records looking for the sounds, snippets, and beats that you never think about, that you never knew existed but do and are so important that they're part of the pop lexicon. Their latest album, Who? is a Donuts style...more throwback record an is loaded with 36 tracks, and a zillion samples but clocks in at only 38 minutes long. It's got tons of stuff you've never heard of but is based around snippets and beats that you swear you know and in fact do know because they are based on the some of the most classic hip-hop breaks and samples but given a 2008 spin.

Originally hailing from London, Woolfy found himself in Los Angeles in the early 90's where rather than going home, he started hanging out in clubs becoming a regular.  That led to him DJing in clubs by the middle of the decade and then eventually making records to be played in them by the turn of...more the century. That brief history brings us bang up to date and to 2009, where Woolfy has teamed up with Projections and released his latest record, The Astral Projections of Starlight.

Legendary soul label owner Neal Hemphill quietly built up a stable of absolutely stunning Southern Soul artists for his label the Sound of Birmingham in a time when Birmingham was known at the heart of the Civil Rights Movement. With all that was going on in that city during that era, this little...more label managed to survive and was the little label that could. It was a label that never had the success of Motown, but as the second compilation of his works show, Neal Hemphill and the Sound of Birmingham was just as prolific and just as good at releasing soulful records that tapped into the times and sounds of the era.

IHEARTCOMIX does it again! The release of Heartsrevolution's single, Switchblade EP is yet another amazing chapter in the growing novel of great music from the label that loves a good Batman comic along with their mind numbing electro.

Two years after their debut album, Settle Down City, Kentucky's own Young Windows have come a long way. This is a band that took their urgent and dirty sound and transformed it into a lethal machine of sonic destruction and their latest album, Old Wounds proves that over and over on each of the eleven buckshots that make up the records feast of post grunge armageddon.

Remember when Of Montreal used to be really, really good? When they were so in love with the Kinks that they almost became the Kinks? Well, A Block of Yellow sure do, and they've picked up the torch dropped by Of Montreal and decided to carry on where those crazy, cross dressing Athenians left off....more They're latest album, Do I Do is so influenced by the Kinks and that whole era it wouldn't surprise me that the members of the band have changed their name to Davies and discovered a love for, "Waterloo Sunsets."

After releasing their latest album Prints found themselves in a bit of a quandary. Although Prints was packed to the gills with their trademark off center pop, the band still had material left over and nowhere left to put it. So, rather than just forget about those songs, the band figured it would be in everyone's best interest to release the Just Thoughts EP.