As we all know, February is for L-O-V-I-N-G, and that’s why we perfectly timed the following three fantastic records for February release. First up is The Album Leaf’s third full-length for Sub Pop called A Chorus of Storytellers. It’s their best album yet – we LOVE it. Did you know that people LOVE The Album Leaf so G-D much that they sometimes get related tattoos? They do! And there are a lot of them – it’s a thing. Read about it and see pictures here. Also out the same day is the first release on new Sub Pop imprint Next Ambiance by Bassekou Kouyate and Ngoni Ba called I Speak Fula. Malian maestro Bassekou is a virtuoso picker and musical visionary whose work blurs the lines between West African and American roots music, and this album has already been LOVED DEEPLY following its European release in late ’09. MOJO named it the #2 World Music album of 2009, and the #27 album overall while Uncut called I Speak Fula “…a contender for African album of the year.” On February 16th, we’re releasing Dear Companion, a collaboration between three Kentucky musicians. The songs were written and performed by Ben Sollee and Daniel Martin Moore, produced by and featuring a dude from My Morning Jacket and Monsters of Folk. Recorded in the first half of 2009 in their home state, Dear Companion explores their ties to the place they LOVE and aims to draw attention to the problem of Mountaintop Removal coal mining (which, they DON’T LOVE) and its impact on the people and heritage of central Appalachia (back to LOVE again; they LOVE these last things).

Don’t forget to check our tour page to see if The Album Leaf, Bassekou Kouyate, Daniel Martin Moore & Ben Sollee are headed your way. (Hint: they are!)

Also, for a chance to win a package of Sub Pop’s new releases for the month of February make sure to leave a comment down below telling me what you think is the best Sub Pop song for Valentine’s Day. (Last month’s winner is Will Sturgeon. He plays music and lives in LA. Check him out here.)

You may be aware that the Grammy Awards were held yesterday in Los Angeles, California. You may, like me, have sat and watched the televised portion of the show (occasionally wincing, frequently confused, often drinking beer). Or, you may, like many people (if their updates on Facebook and Twitter are to be believed), have intentionally missed the Grammy’s altogether. Whatever your opinion of the awards, it’s clear they are kind of a big deal and give artists an opportunity to connect with a wider audience and blah, blah, blah…

WE WON ANOTHER ONE! IN YOUR FACE, EVERYONE ELSE! WE WON AGAIN !!!

Or, kind of…

While he didn’t actually, when you come right down to it, really take home an award himself, Sub Pop/Next Ambiance recording artist Bassekou Kouyate played on an album AND track that each won a Grammy last night. Bassekou played on the Bela Fleck album Throw Down Your Heart and the song of the same name which won in the categories “Best Contemporary World Music Album” and "Best Pop Instrumental.” We’re releasing Bassekou’s album I Speak Fula tomorrow. You should buy it. He sort of won a Grammy! Also tomorrow, Bassekou begins a 5-week tour with Bela Fleck’s Africa Project in Colorado. Full dates can be found here.

Bassekou Kouyate: closer to a damn Grammy than you’ll ever be. (Unless Bret and Jemaine actually read this thing).

Continuing our early 2010 blitz of really very high-quality record releases, on February 2nd we’re offering The Album Leaf’s A Chorus of Storytellers and the first release from Sub Pop/Next Ambiance, Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni Ba’s I Speak Fula. If you pre-order these records, wonderful things will happen to you, wonderful things like a bonus Album Leaf CD/Video, or a terrifically low introductory price of $10 for I Speak Fula. So, unless you’re a masochist (which is just sick, btw), let these wonderful things happen to you.

The Album Leaf’s A Chorus of Storytellers here

Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni Ba’s I Speak Fula right here

If you’re in Seattle, come to the Moore Theater on February 11th for an event called, “Defriending Cancer”. The night will be hosted by Todd Barry and there will be other performances by Neil Hamburger, Tim Heidecker, Natasha Leggero, Eugene Mirman and Tig Notaro. There will also be musical performances by James Mercer from The Shins and Isaac Brock from Modest Mouse.

All of the proceeds from the event will go directly to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. Sub Pop supports this organization to honor the memory of Chris Takino, founder of Up Records.

Come and join us. With this lineup you’ll be sure to laugh your asses off and cry like a little baby. See you there!

Tickets go on sale January 23rd at 10 am and you can get them here

Yesterday the folks at the new CNN.com announced the launch of a couple of new online video series, and one of those video series focuses on our own Handsome Furs! It’s called Indie Asia: On Tour with Handsome Furs and follows Dan and Alexei from Handsome Furs during their first tour across Asia, through China, Hong Kong, Vietnam and Thailand. They took two Flip cams with them on this tour and came up with some super cool stuff. This band is completely based, aesthetically and otherwise, on traveling, on absorbing places and regurgitating them in music, so it’s little surprise that they made such excellent travelogues. You should really take a look!

Available at www.cnn.com/IndieAsia, a new episode of Indie Asia is slated to appear regularly in the travel section of CNN.com beginning on Thursday, January 21.

And, you can read the full news release from CNN on this and their new Vice/VBS.TV series as well right here.

We here at Sub Pop Records will let many Tuesdays go by without even hinting at a release—no singles, no digital-only EPs, no nothing. Not this coming Tuesday, however. No, we are carpe-ing some serious diem on January 26th. We’re putting out 3 Sub Pop debut full-lengths from Beach House, AFCGT (A Frames & Climax Golden Twins), and Retribution Gospel Choir. The Beach House CD/2xLP comes with a DVD featuring a video for each song on the album, and if you pre-order, you’ll receive an amazing little scrapbook we compiled from Victoria’s lyric book from writing Teen Dream. That’s limited to the first 500 pre-orderers, BTW. Retribution Gospel Choir and AFCGT are both pleasantly discounted by $2, which is a lot ITTET. The AFCGT s/t record is LP only—on white vinyl, with a bonus seven inch, and a digital download code (all the LPs have a digital download code). If you pre-order any (or all) of these very necessary records, you’ll have access to a stream so you can listen to them before they arrive in your mailbox.

Beach House’s Teen Dream here

AFCGT’s AFCGT here

Retribution Gospel Choir’s 2 here

Starting right now and going until January 26th (not at all coincidentally, the day that Teen Dream comes out) NPR will be offering you, through their “First Listen” program, the opportunity to stream, in its entirety, the new Beach House album, Teen Dream!

You can listen right here!

Additionally, as of yesterday, GorillavsBear will be streaming a new video everyday this week from the Teen Dream bonus DVD. The band picked various directors, (including the director of the Fleet Foxes’ videos, Sean Pecknold) to create a video around each song off the album and included them all on the aforementioned Teen Dream bonus DVD. Check out the videos exclusively on GorillavsBear this week and look back to subpop.com on Friday for the free video download of “Silver Soul” directed by none other than Beach House’s own Victoria Legrand!

And, you can pre-order Teen Dream from us here as well.

Most of you reading this are probably not aware, but there are a lot of really intense (and mightily appreciated I might add) Album Leaf fans who have chosen to make the band’s logo a permanent part of their physical identity through the ancient art of tattoo. (Check out photos of these fan tattoos over in the band’s MySpace pics)

In an effort to better understand and document this phenomenon, we’ve decided to create a short video. So to that end, we’re asking anyone with said tattoo to do two things!
1) Please film your tattoo and talk about it and post it on youtube with the words “album leaf tattoo” in the title
2) Send us an email to contests@subpop.com with a link to the clip and this form filled in.

If your video gets used we’ll send you a signed copy of the new Album Leaf LP along with a poster, sticker, and some other cool as yet to be determined expressions of gratitude. Our deadline for this is February 2nd, which also happens to be the release date for their brand new album, A Chorus of Storytellers. So show us your tat and tell us your story. We’re dying to know!

Video Clearance Form: http://subpop-public.s3.amazonaws.com/assets/doc/6266.pdf

We hope that it comes as no (or even relatively little) surprise that we here at Sub Pop Records are great fans of a few things that are not actually on or directly related to Sub Pop Records. And one of these things that we are great fans of is the Suicide Squeeze record label. The label is both our neighbor and friend and is right now in the midst of an unbelievable Decade Crushing Sale. Read all about it below, but mostly, you should get over there and get you some.

From Suicide Squeeze Records:

After all the party-ending, porch-collapsing celebration, 2009 is history. Dead and gone, and good riddance… Fuck 2009: the hardest year of our past 14 years. What can I say? The raw truth is that if it weren’t for our bands (their fans, and ours) we’d be dead and gone too. Yeah, the collapse of Touch and Go Records—our exclusive national distributor—hit pretty close to home.

As one year of transition and hope becomes another year, stretching into an unknown, yet blindingly exciting future… All you can do is take the deepest of breaths, and hold tight to the things you love the most…

Help us maintain what we love: our family of bands, and the beautifully diverse music they create. And help yourselves, too, to some of this past decade’s great albums and singles… Everything from our most recent release (Russian Circles “Geneva”) to the earliest 7-inches by Modest Mouse and Elliott Smith—massively discounted. Sound to discover, sound to share.

The Suicide Squeeze Decade Crushing Sale

7" = $2.99

CD-EP = $4.99

CD = $8.99

LP = $9.99

TOTE BAGS = $6.99

T-SHIRTS = $9.99

SWEATSHIRTS = $19.99

Norway, the excellent first single off the upcoming Beach House album Teen Dream, is this week’s I Tunes Free Single Of The Week! Just head on over to I Tunes and nab yourself a free download. You can also pre-order Teen Dream now and receive a very special scrap book from Beach House’s very own Victoria Legrand. So head on over to I Tunes, get Norway for free and then pre-order the album for even MORE freebies. Good stuff.

We told you a little bit about Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni ba and Next Ambiance in this post last year, but I think it’s time for an update and a look ahead to what’s in store for 2010. I Speak Fula was released in Europe in the fall of last year to a pretty incredible response. Among others, Mojo , Uncut and fRoots all had I Speak Fula in their top albums of the year and Bassekou played on, in my humble opinion, the best music television show in the world – Jools Holland (you can watch his performance here and a bonus performance here ).

We’ll be releasing I Speak Fula on CD through Sub Pop/Next Ambiance on February 2nd (it’s available now through Itunes). Bassekou will be spending a considerable amount of time in the US in 2010 with his band Ngoni ba. I haven’t had the chance to see him yet but his live show has the reputation of turning the curious into devoted fans. The first string of dates is part of Bela Fleck’s Africa Project tour. Bassekou was featured in Throw Down Your Heart film, which tells the story of Bela Fleck’s journey to explore the origins of the banjo. The album and the title track were nominated for Grammy’s this year in the Best Contemporary World Music Album and Best Pop Instrumental Performance categories. Bassekou plays on the album and the title track. (Fingers crossed).

Following that tour Bassekou will be taking his band on a headlining tour of the US and hitting various music festivals throughout the spring and summer. There is a list of confirmed dates here . It looks like Bassekou will be playing almost 100 shows in the US this year. Why not check out a show if you can?

Here is an mp3 for the song Musow to give you a taste of what these folks are all about.

You can preorder I Speak Fula here ($2 off before release date)

Mome is a quarterly anthology published by our friends over at Fantagraphics Books and it showcases the best new talent of this decade’s rising cartoon generation, alongside work from some of North America and Europe’s most respected creators. The Winter 2010 issue (Vol. 17) just recently came out and it is, predictably, really great. Less predictably, this same new issue includes a bunch of new full-page black-and-white work from Rick Froberg. Rick also sings/plays in the band Obits whose debut album I Blame You we released in March of 2009. He’s a great artist and is responsible for the cover art on I Blame You as well as a bunch of other stuff.

AND! This Sunday, January 10th, from 5pm to 7pm, Rick will be signing copies of the new issue of Mome at Bergen Street Comics in Brooklyn, NY! There are a bunch of other great artists signing that day as well, namely these folks: Sara Edward-Corbett, Michael Jada, Derek Van Gieson, and Nate Neal.

Bergen Street Comics is located at 470 Bergen Street in Brooklyn, NY.

Refreshments will be served!

Happy 2010, friends! The new decade is starting off right with three new records on Sub Pop that are sure to be contenders for the next ‘best of the decade’ list. (Check back in 2019 to see why they call me Nostraswainus.) On January 26th we are releasing full-lengths by Beach House, AFCGT, and Retribution Gospel Choir. Beach House’s Teen Dream (LP/CD/MP3) comes packaged with a DVD featuring a video for every song on the record, each by a different director. Also, if you pre-order from subpop.com you’ll also be getting a copy of a scrapbook that Beach House’s Victoria Legrand is putting together using scanned excerpts from the lyric book she used while writing Teen Dream! Whoa, get it here. AFCGT is the magical combination of Seattle’s very own A Frames and Climax Golden Twins, and their record is available on LP/MP3 only, and it comes with a bonus 7”. The packaging on this album is really pretty incredible, AND labor-intensive to assemble (I’m talking about the vinyl here; the mp3 packaging is… you know). You will get $2 off of this one if you pre-order with us here at subpop.com. And, lastly but not leastly, Retribution Gospel Choir (Alan from Low rock outfit) will be releasing their 2nd full-length on Sub Pop, fittingly enough entitled 2 (CD/LP/MP3), and that one will also be $2 off through release date. Get that one here. All LPs come with download codes, btw, so don’t be afraid.

Hey! Also, as a new thing, the big bosses gave me the go-ahead to give shit away all the time now, so each month I’ll pick one random commenter to win a package of each month’s new releases, courtesy of Sub Pop and Hardly Art. This month I’d like you to tell me, in the comments section, what you were listening to on New Year’s Eve 2009 for a chance to win the new Beach House, AFCGT, and Retribution Gospel Choir albums. Get to it!

And don’t forget to check out the TOUR PAGE to see which of our fine artists is coming to a city near you in 2010! See you in Ferbruruary.

January 26th is not only my little brother’s birthday, it’s also the release date for Teen Dream, the Sub Pop debut from Beach House. I’ll have two reasons to celebrate, you’ll probably have just the one. But seeing as Teen Dream is already being heralded one of the best records of 2010 (like here and here, for instance), what a celebration it will be! Both the CD and LP versions of Teen Dream come packaged with a DVD featuring a video for every song on the record. (The LP also comes with a download code for all of the songs on the album.) AND! Should you opt to pre-order the album from us, here at subpop.com, you’ll also be getting a copy of a scrapbook that Beach House’s Victoria Legrand is putting together using scanned excerpts from the lyric book she used while writing Teen Dream! She’s making that just for us and we’re giving it just to you, either here at subpop.com or through select independent record stores. She’s super sweet, you guys. So, between that, the amazing songs on the record, the DVD, the fact that you can stream the record after you place your pre-order, and a couple free stickers, you’ve got plenty of reasons to order.

Pre-order Teen Dream here

Download a track from the new record for free here

Hey there online customer! As of this moment (December 21st, 3:30 PST), we will be calling it a year and closing the virtual doors on the shop. Though your order won’t ship until the new year, please feel free to purchase as much as you possibly can until then.

Happy Holidays from the folks here at Sub Pop HQ. May your wildest dreams come true this holiday season.

XO

PS-Check back early next year for releases from Beach House, AFCGT, and Retribution Gospel Choir! Until then, download free MP3s here, here, and here respectively.

Welcome to For the Record #10. I would love to focus your attention on another oldie but goodie, Ugly Casanova’s Sharpen Your Teeth.

Band: Ugly Casanova
Record: Sharpen Your Teeth
When you told you about the first time: May 21, 2002

Ugly Casanova released only one record. The band consisted mainly of Isaac Brock from Modest Mouse with additional vocals by John Orth of Holopaw. The songs are unmistakably Isaac’s; they’re quirky, poppy, folky and still as interesting to me today as when i first heard them 8 years ago. Hotcha Girls and Cat Faces are two of the prettiest songs ever.

I have so many great memories working at Sub Pop with Isaac on this record and aside from developing some great friendships that i still treasure, we got a pretty great record that I know I’ll continue to enjoy for a really long time. You’ll be doing yourself a favor by purchasing it for yourself or a buddy. You can buy it here for the special price of $6 for the next 48 hours or you can buy the mp3’s for $4.

If you already own this record, go grab it and listen to it again. Let your berries dingle and balls jingle to it.

Happy Holidays!

Grist reporter, Eugene Mirman says goodbye to Copenhagen. His farewell video can be viewed here. Enjoy!

Eugene Mirman is still busy reporting the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen for Grist. His new video is all about Dong. You can watch the video here.

The Sub Pop Nerd Cave built a robot to select a random winner from all the comments on the TOP 10 of 09 list early yesterday afternoon. We set the robot to work and he selected young mister Christoper DiGiacomo of O’Fallon, MO. I’ve been emailing with our winner all day today and it turns out he is a swell guy who plays a billion instruments, is very inquisitive, and has a secret crush on Jesy from Tiny Vipers. Christopher will receive all of 2009’s releases on CD. Thanks for playing!

The Milwaukee band until only very recently known as Jail has added an “L” to their name (they are now and, we hope, forever to be called Jaill)! They have also added Sub Pop Records as their new label, and will be putting a new record on said label in 2010! If you’re not already acquainted, let us introduce you to Vinnie Kircher, Austin Dutmer, Andy Harris and Ryan Adams, aka Jaill. You can listen to them on their MySpace page