Today's Hotness: A-Sides, The Sea And Cake, Pop Narcotic

>> This is probably a first: VBS visits Philadelphia's Fishtown section to interview the indie rock up-and-comers The A-Sides and capture them performing slices of hot new numbers. The quintet recently disclosed it had signed to Vagrant. It has had a teaser cut from its long awaited sophomore set Silver Storms floating around since last year, so it is nice the record finally found a home. Anybody with any inside baseball on the deal the band had fall through before the Vagrant deal should shoot us an email; we like stuff like that. Anyway, the new A-Sides material sounds like it has taken cues from the stellar closer "Here or There" from the band's excellent debut Hello, Hello (released on Prison Jazz in 2005). Haven't heard "Cinematic" from Silver Storms yet? Here's a link to the MP3; the record is out Aug. 28.

The A-Sides -- "Cinematic" -- Silver Storms
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>> News to us: In addition to releasing its very sharp seventh studio record this month, veteran indie quartet The Sea And Cake is selling a digital-only EP entitled Anybody. It is only available via ITunes and includes the three tracks "All In Throws" (which sounds like a bit of a throwback to the One Bedroom record), "Breathless" and "Mis." The Sea And Cake released its most recent full-length Everybody May 8; we reviewed it here. Buy Anybody from ITunes here.

>> Interesting feature here in the Boston Globe about the founder of '90s indie label Pop Narcotic, a Boston-based label that issued a number of important releases including the first Helium single and the excellent double 10" Why Do You Think They Call It Pop? Nowadays Pop Narcotic's Bill Peregoy runs a yoga studio, which recently launched a new class that eschews the more stereotypical yoga class soundtrack music in favor of indie rock. If this happened in our neighborhood we'd definitely check it out -- since we already listen to music all day we might as well try yoga while doing some listening.

>> A well-written if run-of-the-mill overview of the current state of the traditional music industry in the New York Times here. Nicely assimilates a lot of news pegs (releases from Paul McCartney and that 50 Cent fellow, mergers and acquisitions amongst major labels and music publishers). Not a crucial read, but if this is the sort of thing you don't follow day-to-day, it links a lot of occurrences together to give a decent picture of the state of things. Likewise, you should probably read this interview of HypeMachine's Anthony Volodkin over at Wired. It might not make a lot of sense if you don't know what HypeMachine is, but if you do it is pretty interesting. The most fascinating thing to us is that Mr. Volodkin is so darn young. We wish we were half as clever when we were his age... in 1995.

>> The Ian Curtis biopic "Control" won best European film at the Cannes Film Festival. NME has the details. Pitchfork recently posted the trailer, which got us a little excited and a little disappointed at the same time. Watch it at YouTube here.