Shorties (Stone Roses, Grizzly Bear, and more)

At the top of my wish list: the remastered Stone Roses debut album collectors edition, which includes 3 CDs, 3 LPs, a DVD, a USB stick filled with video, 6 art prints, and a book. The set will be released on August 10th in the UK.

The Village Voice profiles Grizzly Bear while reviewing the band's new album, Veckatimest.

As for Droste, his grandfather was Harvard's music department head, his mother taught elementary school music, and his aunt plays classical cello. Still, he insists that he took more inspiration from listening to Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville than from Bach or Mozart. Like Phair, he doles out deeply personal (if somewhat obtuse) confessionals: On "Two Weeks," for instance, Droste uses his lilting falsetto to lament being apart from his interior-designer boyfriend, with whom he shares a one-bedroom apartment in South Williamsburg. (Sample lyric: "Save up all the days/A routine malaise/Just like yesterday/I told you I would stay.")

Paste interviews Jason Quever of Papercuts about the band's new album, You Can Have What You Want.

Paste: It seems like a lot of the songs have a dreamlike quality to them, almost as if I’m watching someone project their memory onto a screen.

Quever: I love that imagery that you used. That’s nice. That’s the way I’d like someone to describe it. That feels like it resonates with me, because it’s not stream-of-consciousness, but it’s not conversational, either. I think that seems right, like a recollection of a situation that’s kind of blurry. Also, a lot of people asked me what I listened to while I was making the record, and I was really into super-poppy stuff like Lykke Li. I thought maybe this was like an impressionistic version of that pop stuff. It’s hinting at something, but I don’t really like to go for the love song. It’s more personal, like weird memories or thoughts and dreamy kinds of things.

Decider New York interviews St. Vincent's Annie Clark.

On sale at Amazon MP3:

The Pains of Being Pure At Heart's 10-track self-titled album for $2.99
The Decemberists' 12-track 2007 album, The Crane Wife for $4.99

At NPR's Monitor Mix blog, Carrie Brownstein examines the convergence of music and television.

Then there was The Wonder Years. Thinking back, this may have been the first show I can remember watching that used popular music as a means of both embodying and legitimizing the era the show aimed to represent. Since The Wonder Years was exploring the 60's and 70's retroactively, the soundtrack acted as a mnemonic device. The music was just as much a part of the exploration and story as the visuals and plot.

Paste interviews John Vanderslice.

- David Gutowski