Welcome back to Video Round-Up, where the SD crew picks through the flurry of videos circulating this particular week and posts the highlights.
This week, we’ve got the standard sampling of videos: the special-edition live (Andrew Bird, Beck, Tiny Vipers, Akron/Family), the late-night-TV live (Ray Lamontagne, Metric, the Dead Weather),  the at-a-festival live (Kanye West, Thom [...]

Welcome back to Video Round-Up, where the SD crew picks through the flurry of videos circulating this particular week and posts the highlights.
Peep the treats for the eyes and ears after the jump, featuring Eels, the Faint, Sally Shapiro, Cass McCombs, Julie Doiron, Coconut Records, the Twilight Sad, Andrew Bird, Blitzen Trapper, and Conor Oberst.
Eels [...]

Yep, it’s time again for the quintessential “so far” list — no music site is complete without one! 2009 is shaping up to be an interesting year, with old favorites and newcomers alike issuing strong releases. In an attempt to make some sense out of everything, our staff got together to vote on our favorites.
We’d [...]

Rock and roll? Check. Beautiful festival setting? Check. Theoretically, not much is missing from this combination – in fact, festivals like Monolith, Sasquatch! and our very own Treasure Island and Outside Lands demonstrate that you need not much more than some ace bands and lovely views to make for a good time (well, beer helps [...]

Bay Area musician Michael Zapruder does things a little differently than most artists. Best known (so far) for his 52 Songs project — for which he recorded and released one track online every week for a year — Zapruder also formed an orchestra dubbed the Rain of Frogs, which features a rotating cast including members [...]

We gave a full rundown of 2009 upcoming album releases a few weeks ago, but there are so many great albums coming out today that we thought it deserved a special reminder.
We’ve gushed about A.C. Newman, Andrew Bird and Bon Iver plenty of times before, and Or, the Whale are on a very short list [...]

One of our most anticipated albums of 2009 is Andrew Bird’s Noble Beast, due out January 20th. He’s also releasing a deluxe version entitled Noble Beast/Useless Creatures, consisting of a second disc of instrumentals, featuring collaborations with Wilco drummer Glenn Kotche and bassist Todd Sickafoose (a Bay Area native).
Bird stopped by Nigel Godrich’s excellent From [...]

[This weekly feature is a snapshot of what the SD staff can't get out of our collective head each week. On any given week, we might be digging a new local act, French electro remix, old jazz chestnut, the newest Japanese electro-folk or whatever else we've got on the turntable/iPod that week.]
After a break for [...]

As 2008 comes to a close, we at Stranger Dance are starting to look forward to what 2009 holds. A number of our favorite artists (Andrew Bird, Bon Iver, Jason Isbell, M. Ward, Wilco, etc.) have confirmed upcoming albums and even more are flirting with the idea.
A few things stuck out to us while compiling [...]

Marriott does a great job of butchering songs. Little slices of Andrew Bird can be heard in tons of their commercials, but this takes the cake. “Memory Collector” by San Francisco’s own Kelley Stoltz is already one of those songs you probably don’t want to admit you like, but even I take offense when they [...]