J. Roddy Walston & The Business
Fairfax/Vagrant
J. Roddy Walston is from Tennessee, but he and his band, The Business, split time between Baltimore and Richmond. They also split time between tiresome arena bombast and infectious, smirking boogie-woogie. The group's self-titled record—its first on a label; 2007's Hail Mega Boys was a self-release—comes out today and does [...]

D.C. is the epicenter of Stephen Strasburg fever—but whether the rest of the country likes it or not, the virus is spreading. Spreading even into the mind of singer/guitarist/Yankee fan Steve Wynn.
Wynn, a former member of the Dream Syndicate and Gutterball, has a side project these days called The Baseball Project, with R.E.M. guitarist Peter [...]

Som Records' Neal Becton is calling for volunteers to help shovel out the huge snow wall left on 14th Street in front of the Black Cat. What's the big deal?
Tomorrow is the D.C. Record Fair at the Black Cat. It starts at noon and features 30 record dealers and a full lineup of DJs (Ian [...]

Welcome to the Pitchforkast. Here, your friendly Pitchforkast team (YFPT) will attempt to predict the Pitchfork rating for albums that have not yet appeared on that Web site. Note: Ratings estimates are arrived at through expert guesswork.

TODAY: Liars, Sisterworld—leaked January 2010; out March 8
Holy dude do those Pitchforkers love their Liars. Ratingswise, Brooklyn’s finest [...]

Ask some fans of noisy indie pop,  and they'll tell you the genre hit its apex with Black Tambourine. The D.C. band, one of Slumberland Records' early flagship acts, recorded only a handful of songs around the early '90s—all which, you'd think, were collected on the descriptively titled 1999 release Complete Recordings.
Not so. Slumberland will release [...]

Undoubtedly, two of the biggest names of the last decade's indie rock and electronica were Spoon and Four Tet. In this week's City Paper, our critics take a look at their new records and how each act is faring at the dawn of the 2010s.
Spoon's Transference leaves Marc Hirsh underwhelmed:
Transference is larded with bits and [...]

Tomorrow, D.C.'s True Womanhood will finally release its debut EP, Basement Membranes, on the Baltimore-based label Environmental Aesthetics. Recorded in at least three different studios—Brooklyn's Death By Audio, Magpie Cage, and at home in D.C.—over the course of a year, the EP's six songs are caked with haunting sonic gloop. Guitars drone, drums pound, and [...]

Louisiana's Hurricane Chris has been rapping for over a decade, even though he's only 20. His mother was a rapper, which may explain why he seems unconcerned with credibility. His chief aim, Ben Westhoff writes in this week's City Paper, is concocting giant, crossover club songs. Westhoff writes:
On Category 7: Bad Azz Hurricane, a mixtape [...]

Dear David Byrne,
First off, thanks for the kind Thanksgiving wishes and the unusual hyperlink to various turkey-shaped items! I thought that my access to such Web oddities would be cut off once my aunt forsook Hotmail. But no!
It's also pleasant to hear that you and Mr. Slim are back together—for months I lay awake, fearing [...]

D.C.'s Black Eyes was one of those bands where you ended up collecting every song. The quintet didn't record a lot of them, for one thing—fewer than 30 in the three years it existed. That, and the group's chaotic, genre-hopping, paranoid post-hardcore was—and remains—utterly singular.
You can get a small sense of how that sound emerged at [...]