Uncategorizable New Yorker hipsters Yeasayer have announced details of the forthcoming second album. Entitled Odd Blood, it will be released February 9 on the band's new home at Secretly Canadian.

The follow-up to All Hour Cymbals, their stirring debut that proved one of the best records of 2007, Odd Blood was recorded by the band in the middle of a snowy winter in upstate New York.

The LP will be preceded by a single, "Ambling Alp," a chaotic tumble of keyboard zaps and clattering rhythms that features a particularly soulful vocal from Chris Keating. It sounds like a worthy successor to "Tightrope," the killer cut they contributed to the monstrous Dark Was the Night compile early in '09. Listen below!

• Listen: Yeasayer, "Ambling Alp"

Odd Blood Track List:
1. "The Children"
2. "Ambling Alp"
3. "Madder Red"
4. "I Remember"
5. "ONE"
6. "Love Me Girl"
7. "Rome"
8. "Strange Reunions"
9. "Mondegreen"
10. "Grizelda"

Photo © Guy Aroch

Name: The Love Language
From: Raleigh, North Carolina
Story: Merge Records' latest Love
Sound: Lo-fi wall-of-sound pop

When Merge Records announces a new signing, people take notice. Yet, when the Chapel Hill-based label announced the recent inking of Raleigh-based band the Love Language, the world seemed to shrug. Who were these unknown locals? Most didn't know. But a devoted few already did.

Early this year, the Love Language released a really great record on tiny Bladen County Records. To this point, it's garnered only a cult following, but has absolutely begged for a wider audience. The self-titled set finds songwriter Stu McLamb making a thick, fuzzy, lo-fi platter pealing with chiming pop-songs.

Slugging out jukebox-friendly ballads built on saloon-bar piano chords and heavily-reverberated vocals, McLamb has a wondrous way with melody. On "Manteo" he commands over a tender waltz-time tune that sounds for all the world like it should be coming from oldies radio, if only because of its sweet Phil Spector-styled showers of sleigh-bells.

Making its grandeur all the more impressive is that McLamb recorded these tunes whilst living in his parents' house, in the wake of a relationship gone sour. The seven-piece Love Language live-band was assembled only after the album was finished, but all hands will be on deck for the second LL LP, due on Merge in 2010.

• Listen: The Love Language, "Lalita"

Photo © Nathan Pazsint

The Year: 2002
The Album: The Flaming Lips, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots
Who It Influenced: Passion Pit, MGMT, Evangelicals, the Minus Story, Band of Horses, and, um, Coldplay

For a certain generation, "Do You Realize??" isn't just a song, but an anthem; a gleaming, glorious, slightly-psychedelic power-ballad that sees the exquisite, aching beauty in being but a tiny, frail, mortal figure standing on this rock hurtling through space, desperately trying to fill a life with wonder and love before the inevitability of death comes along.

The centerpiece to 2002's utterly-beloved Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots is something more than just a killer single on a classic record. It's like an alt-rock answer to "Imagine," or something; a tune so universal and transcendent that, for example, the State of Oklahoma named it its Official Rock Song. A tune that finds thousands upon thousands of people gleefully screaming along, every time the Flaming Lips play, about how everyone they know will, someday, be but food for worms.

In such, this song —this anthem— is the song that defines the Flaming Lips. Since releasing The Soft Bulletin in 1999, the band have turned their ridiculous liveshows into seize-the-day-spectacles exploding with as much joy as confetti; life-affirming celebrations of love and positivity. In other hands, that sounds like so much empty Oprah rhetoric, but the Lips' don't airbrush out the death and decay, and come out looking all the more poignant for it.

• Full review: The Flaming Lips, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots

2009 has been a strange year for Los Campesinos!: they haven't released a single album!

The hyperactive Welsh indie-pop posse did the deed twice-over last year, first releasing their debut disc, Hold on Now, Youngster... (one of '08's best albums), and then six months later issuing their second record, We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed; thereby cementing their status as one of 2008's breakout bands.

Now, after the band kept discographically silent this year, 2010 will be bringing with it the third LC! LP. The magnificently-titled Romance is Boring will be released on January 26 in North America via the Broken Social Scene-bankrolled Arts & Crafts, and on the 1st of February in the EU via Wichita.

Writing on their website, Los Campesinos! call Romance is Boring "a record about the death and decay of the human body, sex, lost love, mental breakdown, football and, ultimately, that there probably isn't a light at the end of the tunnel."

Helping them explore the darkness are a bunch of super-special guests, including Jherek Bischoff of the Dead Science, Xiu Xiu mastermind (and sometime Former Ghost) Jamie Stewart, and our old pal Zac Pennington of Parenthetical Girls. Indeed!

Romance Is Boring Track List:
1. "In Medias Res"
2. "There Are Listed Buildings"
3. "Romance Is Boring"
4. "We've Got Your Back (Documented Minor Emotional Breakdown #2)"
5. "Plan A"
6. "200-102"
7. "Straight in at 101"
8. "Who Fell Asleep In"
9. "I Warned You: Do Not Make an Enemy of Me"
10. "Heart Swells/100-1"
11. "I Just Sighed. I Just Sighed, Just So You Know"
12. "A Heat Rash in the Shape of the Show Me State; or, Letters From Me to Charlotte"
13. "The Sea Is a Good Place to Think of the Future"
14. "This Is a Flag. There Is No Wind."
15. "Coda: A Burn Scar in the Shape of the Sooner State"

Los Campesinos Play Four Shows Supporting The Cribs, Just So You Know:
December 2: Birmingham, England - O2 Academy
December 3: London, England - Brixton Academy
December 5: Doncaster, England - Dome
December 6: Edinburgh, Scotland - Corn Exchange