b-sides

Time to kick Tuesday into high gear with five spankin' new songs you need to get to know better. Starting things off, here's Brooklyn teen band the Skins...Click through for more!

Does anyone else organize their iTunes by season? Singer-songwriter Anaïs Mitchell is the artist that got me started doing it, as no single album reminds me more of summer than her 2010 folk opera Hadestown. It's drenched in sunlight, warm voices, young love, and, as Kristin mentioned in her Preacher's Daughter series, a feminist perspective on Greek tragedy. Her latest album, Young Man in America, is spring; all births and unfoldings and discoveries, and an occasional dip back into winter dark. Point being, Mitchell is a songwriter for all seasons, one of young American folk music's best, and she's getting better and better.

Do you like the idea of free, feminist concerts? This radical world music and trans and queer SXSW showcase are two crowd-funded projects you'll want to check out!

Ani DiFranco has taken a lot of sides in her decades-long career. She has also famously refused to take sides, and, undeniably, looked at many things from both sides. Her new studio album ¿Which Side Are You On?, released today, is both a personal State of the Union address from the iconic folksinger, and an appeal to her listeners and the larger world to decide and declare where each of us stands in a world that's begging for champions.

The Last Names is a pretty new band, and as such they don't have much music beyond a pleasant EP that makes me think their upcoming album, Wilderness, will also be pleasant. What they do have, though, is the 52 Covers Project.

PrOphecy Sun is a multimedia performance artist, mother of four cats, and master of the green Line 6 delay pedal. Beginning her music and sound practice with Vancouver-based anarcha-feminist group, Her Jazz Noise Collective, over the last two years Sun has been diving into new collaborations and looking out from the pages of local arts and culture magazines as a result. In addition to her soundscape-y solo project, prOphecy sun, she plays in six other bands, one of which is the new-wave inspired Tyranahorse, winning second place this month at Shindig, Vancouver’s annual underground music competition. When not in band practice seven nights a week, Sun plays giant games of street hopscotch, contorts her body into tiny cupboards, planks grocery check-out counters and sews feline figurines out of found material.  Catch up if you can, PrOphecy Sun is an artist in a windstorm of ambition and all its accompanying forward motion.

On their latest album A Very She & Him Christmas, Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward cover the creepy (yet catchy—creetchy?) classic with a twist: Deschanel is the "wolf" to M. Ward's "mouse." Does this make the song any less of a problem?

If I wasn't already a big fan of French/Portlander musician Tender Forever (I was), I would be after seeing her "Congratulations" tour last week. Currently traveling down the West Coast, "Congratulations" is an all-ages tour that combines Tender Forever's amazing stage presence and music with a bunch of weirder-than-life YouTube videos. It's like going to an awkward house party with no booze and finding out that your friend's sister's friend is playing and she's the best electro pop performer ever. It rules.

Call me old-fashioned, but I think most of the best voices in the world come out of folk singers. Maybe that's just because you can actually HEAR the singing, instead of the beats or the effects (which both have their places in my heart, don't get me wrong). Over the last year I've immersed myself in the Pacific Northwest's stellar Celtic folk music scene, and Colleen Raney has been the clear standout on my playlists and concert-going schedule. I'ma let you finish, but her voice is the best one I've heard in years.

Zola Jesus can be hard to pin down. One minute, she smothers listeners with cold blankets of synthesizers, hitting them with some of the most uncomfortable atmospheres since Second Edition by PIL. Then her opera-trained voice (that voice!) bursts through the sludge and you realize "oh my god, it’s a pop song!" Live and on her latest record, Conatus, she drops a few more clues to the Zola Jesus mystery.