There is nothing lame about meeting bandmates online. Just ask the members of New York-based quintet Freelance Whales. When they connected in early 2008, no one could have predicted the group would bring to life a tidy patchwork of finger-plucked indie-folk tunes stitched with twangy banjos and sewn with whimsical glockenspiel notes. Frontman Judah Dadone is the haunted romantic, but the quiet mood of Weathervanes is not so much about a broken heart as it is about a deeper sense of loss. The wordsmith was inspired by his childhood home (which he believes he shared with a female ghost) and regressive dreams of that time in his life. Sometimes his lyrics are tongue-in-cheek, like on the track “Location” (“No one sees you in your pixilated fishnets / And your black and orange barrettes”, he sings, addressing a ghost), but they are always cloaked with innocuous charm. Dadone trades lead vocal duty with Doris Cellar to bring to life the boy/girl relationship. Together their vocals call from the physical realm and yearn for a response from the ethereal. Kevin Read, Jacob Hyman, and Chuck Criss round out the group and inject a subtle rock influence to the trembling “Broken Horse” and frolicking “We Could be Friends”, adroitly resisting the threat of an overly saccharine debut. Playing with ghosts has never been so worthwhile.

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Mexico’s treasured Nortec Collective is a puzzle with a myriad of individual musicians and artists pieced together to create a larger masterpiece. One of these pieces is Jorge Verdin, better known as Clorofila. Harnessing the Nortec sound without sounding like another Tijuana Sessions Vol. 3 is no small feat, considering the accolades showered on the 2005 release, but Verdin is up to the challenge. Though known as a graphic artist — he has a degree in design, after all — Verdin has been recording so-called “weird sounds” since he was a kid. Whereas the collective traditionally draws on the norteno sound, on his corridos — which are popular folkloric songs about gangsters and drugs — Clorofila presents a banda blowout loaded with bass and brassy notes. As a hidden saxophone jabs through the soundscape, string arrangements ease into 8-bit sounds before giving way to accordion squeezes for an invigorating pastiche of tracks.

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The world lost an icon like no other yesterday when Malcolm McLaren passed away from mesothelioma in Switzerland. He was 64 years old. Of course, he was best known for forming and managing the Sex Pistols and Bow Wow Wow, but through the ’70s and ’80s McLaren wielded influence in realms well beyond punk rock, bringing hip hop and world music to greater notoriety in Great Britain with his own solo work and radicalizing the realm of fashion alongside longtime partner Vivienne Westwood.
     McLaren and Westwood ushered in a renaissance of Edwardian fashions with their clothing shop Let It Rock, which opened in 1971. Traveling to New York the next year on business, McLaren met the New York Dolls whom he would soon manage. That partnership lasted just a few years, culminating in McLaren’s controversial decison to drape the Dolls in Soviet-themed leather regalia for a concert — the backlash of which contributed to the band’s breakup. In the meantime, McLaren reinvented his fashion business under the monicker SEX, which sold S&M styles and certainly influenced Agent Provocateur, the lingerie retailer co-founded by McLaren and Westwood’s son Joseph Corré.
     McLaren’s management roles came to involve the band the Neon Boys (which included future Television founders Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell) and the Strand, who would soon be renamed the Sex Pistols, after a green-haired chap named John Lydon was discovered while wearing a shirt on which “I hate Pink Floyd” was scrawled.

Laura Marling’s rustic sophomore offering goes down like a smoldering shot of your finest bourbon. Once inside, her poignant verses kick your guts around before soaking in to warm your belly and leave you feeling eerily serene. The twenty-year old British folk princess, who has already had an album nominated for the prestigious Mercury award, murmurs rigorous thoughts on love, faith, fear, and loss through measured beats and intricate banjo plucks on this melancholy effort. Her backing band features a rolling cast of characters throughout, including talented members of Mumford and Sons and Noah and the Whale. The organized cacophonies that they weave using flutes, twangy guitars, pounding drums, and more add texture and authenticity to Marling’s moody lyric-centric tracks. Her words remain thoughtful and adamant as ever, reflecting the temperamental process of filling out emotionally as a maturing woman.

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Mi Ami might break your heart. Two of its three members, singer/guitarist Daniel Martin-McCormick and bassist Jacob Long, used to be in Black Eyes — the amazing post-punk band that split just as they were breaking through. The two bands sound similar enough for fans of Black Eyes to imagine what could have been: aggressively polyrhythmic, riotously cacophonous. But Mi Ami is not Black Eyes-lite. Where Black Eyes were a tornado, pulling in and destroying as many divergent genres as they could, Mi Ami look inward. On Steal Your Face, the San Francisco band’s second full-length after a handful of EPs and remixes, Martin-McCormick, Long, and seemingly inexhaustible drummer Damon Palermo have come into their own by devoting an entire record to the exploration of the tensile strength of dub and world music.

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Written and recorded in the far-flung locales of Brooklyn, Sydney, and a botanical garden in the Bay of Naples, this four-piece ensemble offers up its first set of actual songs, following four records of largely instrumental work. Calling to mind fellow practitioners in chamber-pop, like Rachel’s, Joanna Newsom, and Sufjan Stevens, this song-cycle composed by leader Padma Newsome, alongside Bryce Dessner (who also plays in the National), brings together an assortment of guests, such as Stevens, Matt Berninger (also of the National), and Shara Worden (of My Brightest Diamond), whose angelic soprano anchors “On the Edge” and “Cocodrillo”, which begins the album with a hypnotic round of monastic chants and peculiar voicings. “We Were Here” matches tranquil guitar and banjo plucks with glockenspiels befitting a soothing lullaby, while Stevens and Worden’s harmonies suggest something more sinister underneath, as they sing, “You are there, and then you’re not”. Such precarious pairing appears throughout these ten tracks and is accentuated in the album’s very title, which wavers between a children’s fable and medieval monster tale for a hauntingly romantic effect.

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After releasing a slew of one-off tracks (including the amazing “New Flowers” and “Bejan”) and remixes for the likes of Au Revoir Simone and Telepathe in the past year, Jesse Cohen and Eric Emm have finally put out their first EP. Standouts such as “Real Life” and “Policy Of Trust” bring more than just a nominal nod to Depeche Mode, as the Brooklyn duo pairs simple electro hooks with the jubilant global appropriations heard in the recent work of Animal Collective, Vampire Weekend, and Yeasayer. But that’s not to say Tanlines is riding piggyback on the latest trends of indie rock. Throughout Settings, tropical rhythms and synths swell with layers of finger snaps, airy vocals, and intricate guitar riffs reminiscent of Emm’s stint in Don Caballero to build a wall of sound that is wholly at home yet entirely unique to the realms of pop, dance, and world music.

Tanlines will be playing at Le Poisson Rouge with Micachu and the Shapes on March 30.

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We’ve hit the boss level. Hally’s jumping around the stage like a hopped up game-show host, spitting out robotic vocals into a microphone. On the screen behind him, CHiKA’s visuals are spinning and pulsing a ride through letters spelling out his name. He’s wearing mirrored sunglasses and a red leather jacket, and his hair slicked back. He’s ripping through a manic set at the after-party for the second night of 2009’s Blip Festival, and a room full of the world’s greatest chip musicians is dancing like mad. As he breaks into the first verse of “Surfin’ USA”, riding a stream of chords that hit like power-ups, it’s impossible to grasp how music on hardware three-decades old (in this case a stack of customized Famicoms) could be fueling an orgy of pixels and square waves straight out of a William Gibson novel.
     This is the fourth Blip Festival, the brainchild of 8bitpeoples, a chip music collective founded by Jeremiah Johnson (a.k.a. Nullsleep) in 1999 and co-administered by Josh Davis (a.k.a. Bit Shifter), and The Tank, a performance art space that’s been the heart of the New York chip music scene since 2002.

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This Parisian act may only have one EP to their name, but when a link to their new video recently dropped into our inbox, we knew we had to share it. Making what they call “Polyphonic Pop”, this seven-piece’s bombastic baroque sound evokes the Arcade Fire, but with a happier, more playful tenor. And while this song alone is certainly worth a mention, what really struck us is the amazing new clip accompanying “70 Million”. Produced by L’Ogre Productions, the video seems to take off from that pioneering feat in music-filmmaking “Losing My Religion”, in which R.E.M. brought the work of Caravaggio to life. For “70 Million”, Hold Your Horses! add a bit of Monty-Pythonesque panache to acting out paintings, like da Vinci’s The Last Supper, Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, Magritte’s The Son of Man, Munch’s The Scream, Chagall’s La Mariée, and basically every other work one would need to study for an introductory art history survey. So count us among the many excitedly awaiting what this band produces next. But for now, we just wanted to thank them for, well, reminding us all that learning can still be fun.

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