Some more Sockets goodies: A local fan of the label posted some glacial remixes of seven Sockets tracks. And Imperial China has a new video for "Limbs," off its new album How We Connect:

IMPERIAL CHINA – "Limbs" from Sean Peoples on Vimeo.

– Afro-Blue (they kicked ass)

– Arena Stage (it was D.C.'s smartest theater, but it still hit a funding wall)

– Artisphere (yes, blame Rosslyn)

– Bethesda (still not an arts hub)

– Bluebrain (experimental pop band as app entrepreneurs)

– Dance Exchange (dance isn't the only focus anymore)

– Dismemberment Plan, the (the only thing bigger would've been a Fugazi reunion)

– Fillmore Silver Spring, the (we freaked out over nothing)

– Gold Leaf Studios (and why D.C. has an art-workspace problem)

– Imagining Madoff (finally)

– Jefferson Memorial (or: the pre-Occupy Occupy?)

– Moombahton (it went global, but to what end?)

– Movie theaters, east of the Anacostia (don't hold your breath)

– Pop-ups (endearingly ephemeral cultural spaces—or malicious symbols of economic peril?)

– Sockets Records (big ups)

– Street Art (sigh)

– Sweet Tea Pumpkin Pie (the rock festival we deserve?)

– Talent agents (they're here, but the theater scene is still quiet and friendly)

– Timony, Mary (D.C.'s biggest rock star)

– Wale (the DMV should direct its cheerleading elsewhere)

– Wugazi (and why it was an oddball cultural moment)

Plus, tons of non-arts things.

He's also staffed the Vessel EP, which is out today, with some D.C. personnel, including percussionist Nathan Jurgenson (formerly of Phonic Riot, currently of really smart tweets about Internet culture) and Janel Leppin (of new-music duo Janel & Anthony). I've appreciated his songs in the past for their blend of old folk-music tropes and laptop-y atmosphere, but this set gets its power from a more orchestral, organic kind of ambience.

From the songs and from a recent promo video, it's clear Thompson has wanderlust on his mind.  These songs follow him from foreign shores ("took the last boat to America, its ports a one way line," he sings in "In a Velvet City") to domestic coastlines. In "The Pines," the album's most powerful and least characteristic song, he waxes dystopic about (I think) a Gulf Coast oil spill, invoking the devil and communing with a terror-strewn natural world as his vocals are subsumed by a massive, apocalyptic string motif. It's really something.

You can buy the EP from Thompson's Bandcamp page, or stream it below.

Hey, and this isn't the only local release out today. Noisegazers Screen Vinyl Image and backpack rapper yU (I'm not just saying "backpack"; dude does wear a backpack) have new full-lengths, both of which are reviewed in this week's City Paper.

Keep it Aerated: TBD's Sarah Godfrey checked out some grass, specifically the kind trampled upon by audiences at Wolf Trap and Merriweather Post Pavilion. How do they keep those abused patches of turf alive and green? Merriweather uses the same crop of grass as the NFL, while Wolf Trap horticulturalist Philip Goetkin tells Godfrey it's all about poking tiny holes in the soil to let it breath under the crush of thousands of, say, Indigo Girls fans. Says Goetkin: "Everyone was dancing. That's tougher on the turf, but we encourage it."

Sockets for the Summer: Summer begins in six days. Sunscreen rated at SPF 80 might be off the market, but you can still get ready for the hot days ahead with the Sockets Records Summer 2011 mixtape, a surfy mix of echo-chamber rock like Deleted Scenes' new single "Bedbedbedbedbed" and some beach-appropriate electro-pop from Bluebrain's Record Store Day EP. Macaw, Skeletons, Hume, and Buildings round out the mix, which is available as a free download, though without track breaks.

Yesterday on Arts Desk: Abrams and Wetherbee on the Source Festival. Kolowich on Colin Meloy. Baca on the pitfalls of voting-rights tattoos.

The lyrics of “Bedbedbedbedbed,” the new single by Deleted Scenes, sound tinny, but that’s a good thing. The martial drumbeat kicking off the track gives way to Dan Scheuerman (sp) singing into an echo chamber. Lines like “We live in difficult times/I fell behind” ricochet while Matt Dowling and Chris Scheffy supplies a gentle rhythm that could be the soundtrack to a sweet conclusion of a long evening out. Brian Hospital’s measured percussion keeps the pace.

Scheuerman told Spin, which first posted the track yesterday, that “Bedbedbebedbed” is a “broken love song” written about a girlfriend who “really helped me get my shit together.” Flourishes like “Won’t you crawl into my bed bed bed bed bed” give way to a coda in which Scheurman chants “bed” until the song’s punctuated end. The song is the first off Deleted Scenes’ second full-length album, Young People’s Church of the Air, due out in September on Sockets Records (A 12-inch EP is coming next month.)

Deleted Scenes play Saturday, July 16, at 9 p.m. at the Black Cat Backstage, 1811 14th Street NW. (202) 667-7960. $10.

Photo by Laura Rotondo

So you've been told. Follow us on Tumblr.

Besides, as proponents of the Wammies are quick to remind critics, if you don't like the artists that WAMA rewards, you can always pay to join the organization and have a vote next year.

Godfrey has an excellent post on  the hits and misses among this year's nominees. Check it.

I'll add one miss, which I think speaks to the notion that the Wammies privilege known quantities over neophytes.

Check out the Washington Area Record Company category (toward the bottom of the full ballot): Eight labels are nominated. One of them is Dischord, the legendary punk label. It released only one (very good) album of new material this year, and continued reissuing titles from its catalog. Sockets Records is not nominated, even though the local label run by Sean Peoples released five very good albums this year and packed the Black Cat at a showcase last January. The label and its releases earned positive notices throughout the year in City Paper and the Post.

Fine, whatever. There's a reason none of the Wammies' categories employ the word "best." These are WAMA's picks; they're no more a be-all-and-end-all exercise than any group or publication's annual list of superlatives.

But a browsing of this year's Wammies nominees raises enough red flags—like, where's all the good indie rock? It's great that Bob Mould is nominated again, but did he actually release music in the last year? Props for nominating Nadastrom, but why does the list otherwise ignore the EDM scene's banner year?—to suggest that this well-intentioned awards ceremony is pretty removed from much of the great music that comes out of D.C. each year.

I trust my colleagues Mike West and Steve Kiviat will want to add their thoughts.

Meanwhile, Sockets has its annual showcase this Saturday at the Black Cat. Vote with your feet and go.

It’s something of a miracle that Hume's Penumbra never meanders. It has five tracks, only one of which is under four minutes; two are over 10, and at times, both ease into lengthy cool-downs, crescendoing slowly but never boiling over while echo-chamber guitar effects streak like shooting stars. If all of that sounds to you like the makings of a mid-‘70s Pink Floyd record, well, you’re not totally off.

To be sure, much of the album fits into that grey area—that, ahem, penumbra—from slightly earlier in Floyd’s career: the intersection between psychedelia and prog. The record also shares, on the surface, indie rock’s recent taste for tricky rhythms and African guitar sounds like highlife and soukous. Take “Golden Hour,” Penumbra’s opener, in which out of a ponderous haze Hume erupts into the kind of chirpy, chromatic guitar stomp you’d find in a Vampire Weekend song. Then it stops, quickly taking a mathy, acrobatic turn while frontman Britton Powell sings, “I don’t want to know/the color of your room/because if the paint should chip…”

Whatever he’s actually singing about (declining to interfere in someone's life for fear of messing it up? Interior decoration?), I couldn't quite figure out. But by the time the song reaches its lengthy middle section—a piano-tickled, tension-accumulating interlude in which Powell’s honeyed vocals describe finding “the golden hour” with an unnamed other—I was fairly convinced Penumbra was, above all, a missive to the universe. It’s Day-Glo art pop, sure, but it also feels devotional.

The songs are lengthy, but they leave little empty space: At almost every moment, at least one instrument seems to be striking 16th notes, while others move in several different but complementary directions. Songs will give a little to waves of synths and fuzz, but rarely do they completely dissolve into them.

The best and most ruminative song is “Injera,” which Powell played on City Paper’s parking deck during last winter’s massive snowstorm, around when the band was recording Penumbra at Inner Ear with Hays Holladay, of Bluebrain. The track feels like a comedown—from a high, from a romance, from nature at its most oppressive—only it never manages to eschew the haze. Toward the end of the track it trips back into it, as gust-like distortion reaches high emotional pitch and quickly melts away. Meanwhile, the slow-burn theatrics seem to recast Powell’s meet-cute lyrics—at least, I think the song is about an encounter—to heavenly scale. Or maybe “Injera” is just about injera, the sour Ethiopian flatbread. It’s hard to tell. Either way, the song's only direction is skyward.

Buy Hume's Penumbra at Sockets Records.

Hat tip: Sockets.

Sockets' Sean Peoples also dropped off the label's summer 'zine, which documents some of the season's indie-rock happenings, like Layne Garrett's tunnel experiment, Buildings' guitar orchestra, shows at the Cherch and Everlasting Life, and more. How do you get one of these? No idea. Ask Sean, I guess. There are 100, and different versions of the cover, so act quickly.

Lastly: Sockets has a showcase next weekend in Baltimore with SPRCSS, True Womanhood (disclosure: they're my buds), America Hearts, and Foul Swoops.

Penumbra photo courtesy Sockets. 'Zine photo by Darrow Montgomery.