L.A.’s The Bird and the Bee drop catchy, grad-schoolish pop with a hipster-ific set of influences ranging from bossa nova to Bee Gees to Bacharach. The duo, Inara George and producer Greg Kurstin, recently released their second LP, Ray Guns are Not Just the Future, which features coolly restrained tracks that play like the sci-fi [...]

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 [...]