Mayor Bloomberg proclaimed this week “Latin Alternative Week” and there’s a lot to be excited about. For eleven years and counting, artists, journalists, industry personnel, and fans have convened throughout New York City for a peek at what’s next from international stars and newcomers alike during the Latin Alternative Music Conference (LAMC). Expect performances from hip hop and rap artists like Ana Tijoux and Los Rakas (stream below); electronic artists like Nortec Collective Presents Bostich+Fussible, The Pinker Tones (stream below), El Guincho, and Toy Selectah; and rock veterans Maldita Vecindad — at venues such as Central Park Summerstage and the Bowery Ballroom. Santa Monica’s adored KCRW radio station, a media sponsor, and DJ Raul Campos will be broadcasting live sessions. Panel discussions will address topics ranging from the future of digital music to touring to the role of labels today.

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Buy this album at iTunes. To get your baile on, visit latinalternative.com for schedules, including where to find free shows.

Although I’ve lived in New York many years now, one thing that never ceases to amaze me — and that I love — is that, on any given day, you never know who you might meet. Walking down the street you might cross David Bowie. Or sitting in a café, you might look next to you and receive a smile from Natalie Portman, and then proceed to talk with her about the latest French cinema. But not only is it true you might meet a famous person, even one of your own personal giants, there are plenty of unknowns — unknown people, that is — who have crawled onto this island in one way or another to pursue a dream. New York City is an ocean of aspiration — and, as they say, a sea of flesh. Put the two together and you have the world’s greatest, scariest, and most wondrous density of striving and struggling artists…and those…who somehow make it. Walking down my street the other day I met one such dream-seeker, a young woman who I often see walking her dog but had never spoken to.
     Her name is Niia, and she moved to New York City from Needham, Massachusetts to attend the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music as a Jazz vocal major. The great part about her story is that while studying at the New School she met Wyclef Jean, who was so impressed with her voice and musical skills that he began working with her and later featured her on his 2008 single, “Sweetest Girl (Dollar Bill)”, which reached number 12 on the pop charts and took her all over the world to perform. All this I learned later, after we parted.

There’s something comforting yet mystifying about Laurie Anderson. In a single breath, Anderson can wax provocative about economic apocalypse before discussing an upcoming Christmas record by her piano-playing dog, Lola Belle. Yet, no matter how hyper-intellectual or flat-out absurd her words and works might seem, in conversation she somehow straddles the line between pretentiousness and preposterousness without ever succumbing to either. Since her breakthrough work from forty years ago, Duets on Ice, in which she wore ice skates frozen into a block of ice and played violin until the ice melted away, through her ten-plus albums featuring collaborations with William S. Burroughs, Brian Eno, Philip Glass, Antony Hegarty, and husband Lou Reed, Anderson has mastered the far-flung worlds of avant-garde art, literature, film, experimental music, and even technology, inventing instruments such as tape-bow violins and voice filters. Using the voice filters in much of her spoken word and musical works, Anderson cultivated a male alter-ego (in an act she calls “audio drag”) named Fenway Bergamot, whose visage and voice take center-stage on Anderson’s latest album, Homeland, which continues her critique of American identity and injustice.

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Buy Homeland at iTunes. Visit Nonesuch Records to hear song samples. And for more remixes of “Only An Expert”, visit Indaba Music.

Since her explosion onto the American pop charts in 1997 with “Show Me Love”, when she was 18 years old, Robyn has graduated from the school of hard-knocks. Her 2005 comeback album, Robyn, featured songs filled with strife and swelling egoism — the songbook of a girl who’s not going to take it anymore. Her new album, Body Talk Pt. 1 (of what she promises will be a three-part series) is no different. Though these tracks are composed of pulsing, straight-forward dance beats, the lyrics reflect an endless string of heartbreak, boredom, and violent confidence. In the video for “Dancing on My Own”, Robyn proudly presents her biceps like a champion fighter before the ring. While she admits, in the opening track, that her drinking, smoking, PMS, mother, and shoes are killing her, she also posits, “Don’t fucking tell me what to do”. Then, as if the posturing had become exhaustive, she finishes the album with a ballad, “Hang With Me” (whatever you do, “don’t fall recklessly, headlessly in love” with her), and a sweet traditional Swedish folksong, “Jag Vet En Dejlig Rosa”, that shows off her vocal prowess.

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After the jump, check out the video for “Dancing on My Own”. Buy this at iTunes.

Chris Stafford was ten years old when Feufollet formed and the dusty troubadour has returned thirteen years later with the well-seasoned and magnetic En Couleurs. Navigating the waters from childhood musicianship to that of maturing adult is treacherous, but add to that critical acclaim for 2008’s Cow Island Hop and the result could be lackluster. However, the Lafayette, Louisiana-based band geared up to color outside the lines and freed their creative gusto on a slew of original songs. For a band with a reputation rooted in traditional Cajun music, there is nothing staid about En Couleurs with its breezy blend of folk, country, and indie rock. Feufollet, literally translates to “crazy fire” but the band prefers the colloquial “will o’ the wisp” for its amorphous meaning.

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Buy this at iTunes.

With their wild combinations of dance music, hip-hop, 8-bit sounds, and clever conflations, the Pinker Tones produce a globetrotting soundtrack for modern life. Whether kitschy, serious, or fun loving, Modular is a pastiche of perspectives and moods. But nothing is ever totally straightforward with the Barcelona-based trio, who welcome drummer Robert Guibiaqui on their fourth studio album. The surprisingly strong voices of Profesor Manso and Mr. Furia belie their respective backgrounds as producers, while riotous chant-a-long choruses balance the melancholia of long flights and the ecstasy of mixing things up.

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Buy this at iTunes.

Mixing dense feedback and ghostly noises with jangly hooks and three-part harmonies, this quartet reveals the more joyous sides of shoegazing and psychedelia. A cycle of circusy synths whirl throughout the opening track, “Good Feelings”, for an effect that recalls Philip Glass by way of Animal Collective. Meanwhile, “Drunk Kids” and “All Night Outside” combine the drone of Deerhunter with the layered pop of the Beach Boys. Such influences notwithstanding, perhaps, a better way to consider Light Pollution is by looking at the name of the band itself. Aside from its most immediate connotations, the conjunction of “light” and “pollution” and, for that matter, the title of the record, Apparitions, point to the proliferation of something scary, deadening, and dark — all of which has been paradoxically paired with the image of a bright, white, warm glow. The publicity notes accompanying the album report that it was produced “over the course of a long, stoned, agoraphobic winter spent isolated in a heatless warehouse west of Chicago”, which indubitably sounds bleak. Listening to the finished product, however, we can plainly see that “Good Feelings” have prevailed — the dreary and upsetting turn dreamy and uplifting on this debut.

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After the jump, check out the video for “Drunk Kids”. Buy this at Other Music or iTunes.

Playing a bizarre mish-mash of ’70s-era soft rock and Syd Barrett-inflected psychedelia, this British band was co-founded by Blaine Harrison and his guitarist/father Henry. The elder Harrison encouraged his son, at the age of twelve, to form a band as an activity to partly deal with his confinement to crutches due to spina bifida. Following 21 from 2008, Serotonin is still quite informed by a love of 10cc and ELO, but the new tracks shift away from the sometimes exuberantly chaotic sound of their first albums for a more ’80s-inspired set of carefree pop songs. “Dreaming Of Another World” and the title track feature bouncy hooks driven by glam-rock guitars and New Wave synths reminiscent of Pulp (likely influenced by producer Chris Thomas, the man behind Different Class and Roxy Music’s modern classics). Meanwhile, jubilant whistles and kazoos somehow work well amid the odd romanticism of “Flash a Hungry Smile”, as Blaine sings about “birds and bees” and STDs. After three albums of scattered availability stateside, this five-piece from Eel Pie Island (a whimsically sounding place that complements the whimsical sound) are releasing what promises to be their inevitable breakout.

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Watch the video for “Dreaming Of Another World” after the jump. Serotonin hits stores on July 13. Buy this at Other Music or iTunes.

Angela McCluskey’s mother promised her that one day she would look like a Christmas tree. And she does. Depending on when you catch her and what your mood is, McCluskey could be a haphazardly-but-enthusiastically-decorated-by-the-kids tree. Or she could be a candle-lit, comfort-bringing, anticipation-ridden, pine-scented tree. Most of the time, McCluskey is both.
     It is this combination that attracts young and old, famous and infamous, rich and poor to McCluskey’s side. At her 17th anniversary party with husband Paul Cantelon, McCluskey’s home is bursting. The cross-section of guests represent the Los Angeles melting pot, which one rarely sees gathered in the same place. Star-studded, but not glittering, McCluskey has a way of humanizing everyone that comes into contact with her. There is no distinction between McCluskey’s goddaughter, Riley Keough — Elvis’ granddaughter — or Alison Owen, the mother of McCluskey’s other goddaughter, Lily Allen.
     McCluskey brings the notable and the obscure together, breaking down the reserve of the former and bringing up the assurance of the latter. Within her inner circle, which McCluskey calls the “Ring Of Fire”, there is a core of seven girls who serve as each other’s security blankets.

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Buy this at iTunes.

A blonde woman struggles to keep an oily black liquid from oozing through flowery wallpaper. A mumbling man washes what seem to be giant eggs in a stream. A family camping out and roasting marshmallows on an open fire somehow segues into a moment of demonic possession and an orgiastic food fight. And alien beings perform some mysterious fire ceremony, amid tribal drums and other rhythmic weirdness, before flashing to audio/visual noise that certainly could induce seizures in the more epileptically vulnerable.
     Animal Collective, the ever prolific group hailing from Baltimore, have followed up last year’s acclaimed Merriweather Post Pavilion and Fall Be Kind with this “visual album”, a collaboration with Philadelphia filmmaker Danny Perez that premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and has been touring the world in one-off screenings. The 54-minute film marks the culmination of four years of “an open-ended operation of audio-video synthesis”, said Perez, who previously helmed concert films for Black Dice and Panda Bear, “the passing back and forth of visuals and sound so that each would inform the other and create an organic structure.”