The Deep Dark Woods: The Place I Left Behind (Six Shooter / Sugar Hill, 2011)
The Deep Dark Woods from Saskatoon, Canada is my new favourite band and their new album The Place I Left Behind is one amazing album. It will definitely be the album of the month and someone must release one hell of an album later in the year, if this doesn’t end …

Bahamas: Pink Strat (Brushfire Records, 2011)
Bahamas is the moniker of Afie Jurvanen who is a Finnish-Canadian singer-songwriter from Toronto. I was obviously curious about the Finnish background and tried to find some information about it. Couldn’t find much, but if the internet contains the right information, Afie has a Finnish mother. Which is nice, but obviously this Finnish background thing is just an interesting side …

Shotgun Jimmie: Transistor Sister (You’ve Changed Records, 2011)
I often praise only the 90′s power pop groups, but those indie rockers like Pavement, Sebadoh, Guided By Voices did some equally great things back then. Shotgun Jimmie from Canada and his new album Transistor Sister brings to mind some of those north american indie rock heroes from the 90′s. The album is filled with short, quirky and extremely …

Dawes: Nothing Is Wrong (ATO, 2011)

Oh my. Time Spent In Los Angeles and If I Wanted Someone. That’s one hell of a way to start an album. Two songs that both easily qualify to the “hey, this must the best song ever” -category. At first, it almost seemed like those two songs are just too damn brilliant and the rest of the album just can’t …

Hezekiah Jones: Have You Seen Our New Fort? (Yer Bird Records, 2011)

Lately I’ve been getting more and more addicted to Hezekiah Jones. It’s a Philly-based folk collective led by Raphael Cutrufello. Their latest album Have You Seen Our New Fort? came out a couple of months ago on one of the best labels there is Yer Bird Records. They don’t have the financial muscle to …

Patrick Sweany: That Old Southern Drag (Nine Mile Records, 2011)
I probably know more about underwater rugby than I know about blues music, but there’s no doubt in my mind that Patrick Sweany’s soulful blues rock is just damn brilliant.  That Old Southern Drag is Patrick’s fourth album. I haven’t heard the earlier ones. A couple of them were produced by Dan Auerbach from The Black …

The Mommyheads: Delicate Friction (Dead Frog Records, 2011)
The Mommyheads concert at klubi, Turku has been one of the highlights of the year. They played for a long time and sang so beautifully. I loved it to bits. I’m not as thrilled about their latest album Delicate Friction, because it’s not style-wise totally my kind of stuff. I love their great pop singles, but at times …

Buffalo Tom: Skins (Scrawny Records, 2011)

Some indie veterans should have stayed in the 90′s, because they can’t come up with anything even half as good as back in the day. However, this is not the case with the Buffalo Tom. This legendary indie  rock group continues to impress. Three Easy Pieces was a really good return four years ago and Skins might be even slightly …

Jason Isbell & The 400 Unit: Here We Rest (Lightning Rod, 2011)
The previous Jason Isbell & The 400 Unit album had 3-4 fantastic songs, but as a whole I didn’t love it that much. This is not the case with Here We Rest. Now Jason gets pretty much everything right and releases an album that is full of wonderful songs. Ok, to me the quality …

Matt Woods: The Matt Woods Manifesto (2011)
Matt Woods is a pretty damn good country/americana singer-songwriter from Knoxville, Tennessee. His new album is called The Matt Woods Manifesto and it’s impressive stuff from first chord to last word. I mostly listen to the soft and beautiful country songs, so it’s actually quite refreshing to spend some quality time with a really good album that also contains …