Two for Your iPod

Damn — I meant to get the jump on this, but ah, well… Today’s the official release date for No, Not Me, Never, by Denver nu-New Wavers The Photo Atlas, and their people were kind enough to hand us an MP3 off the new album for free-free-free, baby. Best price there is, I’m tellin’ you… Anyway, the track’s “Handshake Heart Attack,” and it’s fairly addictive, in a frantic, angry, dance-punk kind of way — I’m not big into that particular scene, I’ll admit, but I like this because it feels a heck of a lot less self-aware and hipster-ironic than a lot of other practitioners of this sort of thing. It makes me think of The Rapture if the band got into a knife fight onstage with one’a them crayzee noise-punk bands, and that happens to sound entertaining as hell to me, at least.

Sadly, The Photo Atlas are one of the half-dozen or so SXSW bands not making a stop down here in Helltown, U.S.A., but if you’re up there for the festivities, check ’em out (dates on their Website; they’re apparently playing five freakin’ shows in the span of three days, and I don’t have the energy to put ’em all up here, sorry).

On the other side of the coin, the awesomely-cool Palomar will be playing our fair city over at Rudyard’s on Wed., March 14th, before the head on up to Austin. When I first saw the listing, it was one of Rudz’s “Turbojugend Humpday” things (what the hell’s a Turbojugend, anyway?), and I did a bit of a double-take, since those shows seem to be mostly locals — not that that’s a bad thing, of course — and Palomar are definitely not local. I’d halfway figured this was yet another case of local-band-with-the-same-name-itis (it’s happened to me recently, although I’m blanking on the name), ’til I got an e-mail from the label.

At any rate, going by the sample they’ve got up from their new album (due out 3/20), All things, forests, “Our Haunt,” it’s going to be quite a show. It’s a lot darker than the previous stuff I’ve heard from ’em, with some murky bass and a little bit of a Neko Case feel to Rachel Warren’s gorgeous vocals, but there’s plenty of fire there, too, particularly on the guitars. My one complaint is that it sounds like it ends about a minute too early. Hate that; want more, dammit.