There's a new album by Spoon called "Gimme Fiction" that's pretty good.
Also, here are a couple of capsule reviews from the NY Times the other day that sounded really interesting. (they're available on eMusic, too - FWIW)
'Separation Sunday' - The Hold Steady
The Hold Steady is a band from Brooklyn that looks back to move ahead on its second album, "Separation Sunday" (French Kiss). Craig Finn, the leader, came to New York from Minnesota, where he led a band called Lifter Puller that also included the Hold Steady's lead guitarist, Tad Kubler. Performing last week at the Bowery Ballroom, Mr. Finn described the Hold Steady as a bar band, and where Lifter Puller used to back him up with circling, insistent guitar vamps, the Hold Steady adds an old-fashioned classic-rock swagger, direct from the Rolling Stones and Bruce Springsteen and Elvis Costello. The Hold Steady definitely knows how to mesh a pair of guitars and splash some keyboards on top.
Mr. Finn isn't a standard lead singer: he's more of a lead shouter. He talks more than he sings, telling stories in rhyme but not exactly rapping, though he does come up with good old-fashioned rock choruses. In that, he follows through on New York talk-rockers like Lou Reed and Patti Smith, not to mention another Minnesota émigré, Bob Dylan. The songs on "Separation Sunday" continue the tales of characters from the Hold Steady's 2004 debut album, "Almost Killed Me." They're people from a misspent Midwestern youth: drunks, druggies, lovers and a lot of suburban Catholic kids gone wrong. In songs with titles like "Crucifixion Cruise" and "How a Resurrection Really Feels," they're looking for redemption when they're not looking for thrills. These are songs full of offhand aphorisms, and they can grab you from the first line, like the one that starts "Multitude of Casualties": "She drove it like she stole it." Of course, Mr. Finn climbs right in for the ride.
'The Wedding' - Oneida
Since 1997 the prolific and protean Brooklyn band Oneida has been exploring rock as incantation and bombardment. It has drawn on the patterns, the blare and the perpetual motion of Minimalism, primordial metal, 1970's kraut-rock and organ-driven garage-rock. Its two most recent releases, the excellent late-2004 EP "Nice./Splittin' Peaches" (Ace Fu) and the new album, "The Wedding" (Jagjaguwar), still feature the motoric keyboard-and-drums workouts that make Oneida so exhilarating onstage. Now Oneida is dipping more deeply into the 1960's. Some songs on "The Wedding" add the chamber-pop refinement of a string section; others invoke the haunted, distortion-edged drones of the Velvet Underground, the feathery fingerpicking of Pearls Before Swine, and the measured reverb grandeur of early Pink Floyd. And where the music grows more pensive, so do the lyrics. Although Oneida still cherishes enigmas and portents of death, "The Wedding" also includes something like love songs, including "Know," a series of apologies carried by Philip Glass-like string arpeggios: "I'm sorry you told me I block out the sun." "The Wedding" has some misfires, but vulnerability makes a promising new territory for Oneida. As much as this band loves repetition, it's determined not to repeat itself.
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