LHB’s Shorties (Pavement, Merge Records and More)

Fresh Cherries from Yakima explains what your favorite Pavement record says about you.

Some bargains at Amazon MP3:

• Monsters of Folk's 15-track self-titled debut album (featuring Conor Oberst, Jim James, M. Ward and Mike Mogis) for only $3.99
• the 15-track Warren Zevon tribute album, Enjoy Every Sandwich: The Songs of Warren Zevon (featuring tracks by Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and more) for only $1.99

The Norwich Evening News interviews former Smiths (and current Cribs) guitarist Johnny Marr.

The Guardian's music blog explains the importance of Nirvana's Bleach album to grunge.

The Hook interviews Chris Funk of the Decemberists.

Paste's band of the week is WHY?.

Yoni Wolf has long been a remarkably prolific artist, his discography as WHY? littered with dozens of split singles, EPs, limited edition CD-R’s, collaborations and albums with and without a backing band. But he didn't really find peace with that moniker until 2008's Alopecia. Continuing his gradual drift from experimental hip-hop to a deconstructed and highly personalized brand of indie rock, it was an album of angry observations and smoldering paranoia, a singularly engrossing exploration of sex, death, and self-effacing jokes. Still, in keeping with his prodigious creative pace, Wolf wasn’t content to create just one album with his now solidified outfit, which consists of his brother Josiah and longtime friend Doug McDiarmid. Even while recording Alopecia, he was readying its morning-after follow-up, Eskimo Snow (out Sept. 15 via Anticon Records).

Drowned in Sound interviews Portishead's Geoff Barrow about his new project, BEAK.

AOL's Daily Finance blog interviews Merge Records founders Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance.

Q: When Merge was founded 20 years ago, it was trying to sell individual songs. Now you can theoretically return to that model, selling digital files of individual songs.

LB: We're still trying to sell albums.

MM: Yeah, we still think in terms of albums. When we started Merge, the industry at large was already a singles-driven industry because of MTV. So for a while, the major-label approach was to put everything into one single, and then people would have to buy the album. But people started going down this road where they were excited to hear a Britney Spears single but didn't have to have the album. Whereas with artists on Merge, some songs could be "hits," but fans wouldn't think of the songs as replacements for the albums. So you can consume one song at a time, but we don't think of our records that way.

- David Gutowski