While this week might be Spring Break for college kids bound for Cabo, it’s arguably the holiest week for music lovers—that’s right, it’s South By Southwest. To help prep for your SXSW experience, FILTER is bringing you a taste of the Austin festival’s must-see musicians each day this week in the form of excerpts, interviews, and even a tattoo giveaway. So take some time out from mapping your road-trip, rest those cowboy boots and brush up on SXSW’s top-tier performers.

While this week might be Spring Break for college kids bound for Cabo, it’s arguably the holiest week for music lovers—that’s right, it’s South By Southwest. To help prep for your SXSW experience, FILTER is bringing you a taste of the Austin festival’s must-see musicians each day this week in the form of excerpts, interviews, and even a tattoo giveaway. So take some time out from mapping your road-trip, rest those cowboy boots and brush up on SXSW’s top-tier performers.

For day three of SXSW week, we’re letting you in on an unusual freebie. The Kissaway Trail, a five-piece band from Denmark known for its lush and layered sound, has sketched a tattoo of a reverb pedal (the group’s favorite toy) exclusively for FILTER. Look inside FILTER’s latest Good Music Guide, rip out the page with the designated sketch—or print out the one below—and see if you can track down The Kissaway Trail as they roam the streets of Austin. Once you find them, a drink (and tattoo) will be on the band!

Hint: The Kissaway Trail will be performing at FILTER’s Showdown at Cedar Street March 18.

For more info on The Kissaway Trail's new album, Sleep Mountain, check out the band's official web site: www.thekissawaytrail.com

Gorillaz will open up rehearsals to their fan club (G-Club) around the UK ahead of their April headline debut at the 2010 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. Joining Damon Albarn for these live rehearsals will be Paul Simonon and Mick Jones from The Clash amongst others as Gorillaz take their rehearsals on the road.

These unique events which Gorillaz have never done before are band rehearsals only - and will not feature full Gorillaz visual production.

Though their debut album Manners was released less than a year ago, Passion Pit are treating their fans to a deluxe reissue, out April 13 via Frenchkiss/Columbia. The reissue will feature three bonus tracks and new artwork. Currently on the road, the band will continue their existing tour, and have added more dates, spanning North America into the summer.

While this week might be Spring Break for college kids bound for Cabo, it’s arguably the holiest week for music lovers—that’s right, it’s South By Southwest. To help prep for your SXSW experience, FILTER is bringing you a taste of the Austin festival’s must-see musicians each day this week in the form of excerpts, interviews, and even a tattoo giveaway. So take some time out from mapping your road-trip, rest those cowboy boots and brush up on SXSW’s top-tier performers.

When they first learned to play music, Toby Leaman and Scott McMicken played it together. Swapping songs, trading licks and serving as de facto third and fourth ears for each other’s tuneful experiments since the 8th grade, the dual-frontmen of Dr. Dog - the lovable, high-spirited quintet founded in Philly but firmly rooted in ’60s pop—have shepherded their craft from just an underground hobby to a national affair. Steadfast touring and a special devotion to mid-century rock has carried the band from basement recordings to big-city production, and with their new release, Shame, Shame, Leaman and McMicken hope to continue the upward rise—and higher education—of Dr. Dog.

Shame, Shame, the group’s sixth LP and the first recorded (at least partly) in a professional studio, also signals a change in higher personnel. Parting ways with longtime label Park the Van (Pepi Ginsberg, The Capitol Years, The Teeth), Dr. Dog has now linked arms with the much larger and more visible Anti- Records—home to acts like Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, Tom Waits and Neko Case. Both Leaman and McMicken describe the switch as a necessary spurt in the growth of a healthy band, and though the long-term result is yet to be seen, the increased resources afforded by a bigger label has already rendered an album that is well produced yet still faithful to Dr. Dog’s lo-fi, DIY aesthetic. Like 2008’s Fate, the new record contains its fair share of addictive pop-rock singles but also points back to the days of 2005’s Easy Beat, when the band’s highly-prized live sound was somehow captured, reverted and translated accurately to tape. Thus, Shame, Shame reveals a band at the borderlands of then and now, comfortable in its own skin and not afraid to refine the things that work—and ditch those that never quite succeeded as planned.

Slacker and FILTER have launched today FILTER Magazine - Austin 2010, a free radio station offering a wide range of indie tunes selected by editors here at FILTER. The station is now available in the Slacker Spotlight section from Slacker Radio applications, on home entertainment devices and leading smartphones or can be accessed directly from the web at www.Slacker.com/FILTER.

Quirky troubadour Devendra Banhart has released the Ron Winter-directed video for "Baby," from his October release, What Will We Be. In true Banhart fashion, the clip is a trippy, psychedelic affair, complete with a hipster possee featuring MGMT's Andrew VanWyngarden and the Strokes' Fabrizio Moretti and GZA as some sort of planetary diety. Also, there are aliens. Enjoy.

With music playing such an intricate role within our daily lives, it’s hard to imagine that it can alternatively be used as a form of punishment.  In prisons and detention camps around the world (like the controversial Guantánamo Bay), loud music has been used a form of torture. 

Renown for their impressive and consistent career videography, Massive Attack's latest for "Saturday Come Slow (feat. Damon Albarn)”, is perhaps their most haunting.  Blending first person testimony of Guantánamo Bay loud music torture tactics with scientific talk about its agonizing affects ("distortion can be more annoying than loudness"), it's a heavy and melancholic realization about sound.

Check out the eight minute short film, “Saturday Come Slow”, streaming on FEEDER.

Heligoland is out now courtesy of Virgin Records.

Brooklyn pop duo Sleigh Bells, will release their debut album, Treats, May 11, courtesy of M.I.A.'s NEET label and Mom + Pop. Treats was produced by guitarist Derek Miller, who also recently did some work on M.I.A.'s forthcoming third LP. The duo will hit SXSW this week, before jetting out on a widespread trek, playing a few dates with Major Lazer, before opening for Yeasayer on their headlining tour.

While this week might be Spring Break for college kids bound for Cabo, it’s arguably the holiest time of the year for music lovers—that’s right, it’s South By Southwest. To help prep for your SXSW experience, FILTER is bringing you a taste of the Austin festival’s must-see musicians each day this week in the form of excerpts, interviews, and even a tattoo giveaway. So take some time out from mapping your road-trip, rest those cowboy boots and brush up on SXSW’s top-tier performers. 

The SNL digital shorts have become a weekly highlight, if only just to catch the celebrity cameos. Usually featuring Andy Samberg front and center, each video is crazier than the next. This week, in a strange twist of events, Strokes' frontman Julian Casablancas joins the ride for "Boombox," off The Lonely Island's debut, Incredibad. It's pretty epic.
 

FILTER likes music. There's no hiding it. We also like our own opinions a whole bunch, so once a week we give the masses a fleeting glimpse into our selective stereos to let them see firsthand what fuels our endless devotion. We like to think of it as community service. We're selfless like that. So without further ado, here are the official, inarguable, objectively good Filter Weekly Picks. And in case you trust our tastes that much, click on the links below for some sample tracks (not all releases have samples available) from these releases, and even buy it if you feel so inclined. Yeah, we're good at what we do:

American Rag and VTech - FILTER's Showdown at Cedar Street

Merle Haggard - Down Every Road

The Constellations - Southern Gothic

Broken Bells - Broken Bells

Neon Indian - "Sleep Paralysist"

AM - Future Sons & Daughters

EPROM/ESKMO - Hendt/Lands and Bones 12"

Various Artists: Kitsuné Maison 9: The Petit Bateau Edition

Stricken City - Songs About People I Know

Nosaj Thing - Drift

Despite little information circulating about New York by way of San Diego twosome, Cults, their music seems to offer all that you really should know.  Perfectly constructed lo-fi indie pop gems, their songs translate an alternate sense of freedom and individuality, despite the negative connotation that their communal name may illicit.

Nothing speaks louder and undeniably more charming about such liberated intensions than the track, "Most Wanted".  As the lyrics relate handshakes in the dark, parental warnings and the inevitable balance of the drifting past to the democratic future, it can all be summarized when lead singer Madeline Follin croons, "what is most wanted is bad for me I know".

Let the bad in with the good and download "Most Wanted" via their official Bandcamp page.