It's likely no accident that, at least on cursory listens, Psychic Chasms (Lefse Records) sounds out-of-time and incidental, like the gauzy score to a local-access television spot long relegated to the backwaters of YouTube. Certainly, there's a degraded and lo-fi quality to this debut by Neon Indian, the project of 21-year-old Alan Palomo, who is based in Austin. That [...]

It's probably not fair to call The Pains of Being Pure at Heart a lo-fi band. Certainly, the New York group's self-titled album sounds appropriately hissy and fuzzy. But "lo-fi" also connotes an attitude, a puritanical devotion to songwriting whether it comes at the expense of sound quality or not.
But when the four-piece, which plays [...]