Greetings, earthlings! This week: Mountain Goats! Rural Alberta Advantage! Arablak! Sons of Freedom!

The Mountain Goats have a new album called All Eternals Deckl coming out on March 29 on Merge Records. The album features Mountain Goats mainman John Darnielle joined by fomer Nothing Painted Blue bassist Peter Hughes and current Superchunk drummer and American radio funnyman Jon Wurster. The album also features several tracks produced by former Morbid Angel guitarist Erik Rutan. Last week, music blog Stereogum debuted the album’s first track, “Damn These Vampires”.
mp3: “Damn These Vampires” (via Stereogum) by the Mountain Goats

Rural Alberta Advantage is pretty much the best band in Canada hands down. I said hands down. Well, that’s your opinion. Rolling Stone Magazine of all places got the dibs on their new video, for the song “Stamp”, from the forthcoming long-player Departing, the follow-up to the RAA’s much-beloved debut Hometowns.

Arablak or one of his agents sent me a seemingly random Twitter message, touting this Atlanta rapper as “fundamental #BoomBap at it’s finest” (sic). That’s good enough for me. See, this part is the Boom, and then that part is the Bap.

From the digital crypts…
Sons of Freedom were on my mind the other day, so I looked them up. According to Wikipedia, the Vancouver band’s second album, 1991’s Gump, debuted at the top of the Canadian campus radio charts “ahead of Nirvana’s Nevermind, which debuted the same week at #2.” Of course, history barely remembers the Sons now, who drifted off into such projects as Lee Aaron’s 2Precious and Rat Silo. That first, selft-titled album from 1988, though, that’s a stone-cold classic. It was produced by Matt Wallace, who also produced Faith No More’s first few records, as well as cuts for John Hiatt, Maroon 5 and something called “the New Monkees”. The Sons of Freedom album doesn’t sound completely dissimilar to its CanRock contemporaries from the Tragically Hip or 54-40, but it’s a lot meaner and hungrier. There’s a hard edge of nihilism that separates SOF from the Canadian alternative scene of that era, an era that crested with the rise of the Barenaked Ladies, of all bands. Every track from Sons of Freedom’s self-titled debut is available for free download at the band’s official website, Sonsoffreedom.ca.
mp3: “Super Cool Wagon” by Sons of Freedom

Emmet Matheson is a freelance hobo detective who blogs at A Bulldozer With a Wrecking Ball Attached. You can e-mail him at: bulldozerDOTwreckingballATgmailDOTcom