The Rentals Last Little Life EP is now available for pre-sale through the Boompa Store! If you order it now it will be shipped to you right away along with a Rentals sticker and a poster signed by the band. Click here to buy it now!

The Rentals played their first of four shows at Spaceland last week. Kyle took a little video from the side of the stage and posted it on The Rentals Youtube Channel. It’s just a small taste of how…

The almighty Pitchfork has reviewed Garden Cities of To-morrow and they quite liked it! Here’s a bit of what they had to say:

“Baxter’s jazzy alto carries echoes of singers like Ella Fitzgerald … standout “Sugar” opens with pulsing “I Am the Walrus” Mellotron before dissolving in country-rock lead guitar licks, delirious strings, whirling Wurlitzer, and ostinato bass line. A flute quartet, harp, timpani, marimba, and even djembe dress up other tracks in full Herculean garb, with Ennio Morricone’s flair for the cinematic…

This Sunday if you happen to be in Toronto you should head down to the Harbourfront Festival for the music of mostly instruments. The mainstage acts will be vibraphone love-fest The Hylozoists and Arcade Fire alumnus Belle Orchestre. The former are on at 3PM, the latter at 4:30. Says Frank of infamous music blog Chromewaves: “It will be epic — a vibraphonic orgy.”

That said, you might be interested in reading this week’s Eye Weekly feature about the Hylozoists so click here.

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”(Beautiful House) is an 11-track album that charmingly blends Stagger’s country roots with (Danny) Michel’s melodic-pop convictions … Judging by the winning sound of the new disc the future looks promising for the youthful tunesmith.” - Georgia Straight

Check out the complete half-page feature on Leeroy Stagger in this week’s Georgia Straight! Or read it online - click here.

“We had, like, 20 people come up and play with us,” explains (Thomas Shields) the multi-instrumentalist over the phone as ZZ Top blasts in the background. “I kept on getting clocked in the head with the microphone stand. There were five people drumming. It was like a giant gong show. Everyone ended up playing together again outside at a construction site near the club. People were banging on whatever they could to make noise and there were two people playing cowbells…”

You…

“Sometimes, when I start to look back on a year’s worth of good music, as I usually begin to do around this time, I think of what record labels have put out the best music over the year. In 2004, folks like Ipecac, Relapse, and Century Media have put out plenty of music of extremely high quality, but while those labels’ artists will probably feature prominently on my year-end list, the one record label that has been the most fun…

Matt Sharp, former Weezer bassist and Rentals frontman, is a better person than he used to be. That’s because he moved to the tiny town of Leiper’s Fork, Tennessee, and holed up alone with his music.

“Sometimes you just need to check yourself a little bit, and music is the best thing for that,” he says on the phone from the road in Nebraska. “I do that quite a bit through music - just figure out how to treat people better and…