Vostok is a lake 2 miles under the surface of Antarctica and is thought to be over 1 million years old. Scientists have been drilling to reach the lake to find out if life can survive in such harsh environments. After 20 years of drilling they finally reached the lake today and in honor of that Fanfarlo has released the track “”Vostok, I Know You Are Waiting” which isn’t a track that you’ll hear on their new album Rooms Filled With Lights unless you fork out the $35 for the limited edition box set. The box set includes additional tracks, artwork by Allison Diaz and a compass (of course).

This track is one of the better ones that we’ve heard out of the band recently and probably should have been included on the main release of the album. It starts out with the sound that you would probably imagine an Antarctic wind would sound like then transitions into an ode to Vostok with the idea that the lake has been waiting there for 20 million years for us (don’t even get me started on why I don’t agree with drilling into this lake) and closes out with the sounds of cracking ice under reverberating piano. It’s still I sound that I’m trying to get use to from the band but it’s not as out reaching as “Deconstruction”.

Rooms Filled With Light is out February 28th via Atlantic Records

It will come as no surprise to find out that Mike West, the founder of The Lost Cavalry, is the former guitarist for London darlings Fanfarlo. There are some obvious similarities between the two bands, heavy percussion use from various worldly instruments, story telling lyrics and bravado vocals. All of which makes for some great listening.

With a release date of Nov. 21st Snow City Radio will be the band’s second EP after their 2010 release Waves Freeze To Rolling Hills. Just as expansive and tantalizing as Waves Freeze, Snow City Radio shows growth and maturity from a more seasoned West. Each track is a story unto itself that builds on the previous, not in story line but in presence. If you’ve enjoyed Fanfarlo’s then The Lost Cavalry should be your next stop.

The Lost Cavalry – “The Tower”

Fanfarlo have finished up their yet to be titled sophomore album with producer Ban Allen (Cee-Lo, Animal Collective). The first sounds that we’re getting from the album is opening track “Replicate” and from the sounds of it I’m not getting any warm fuzzies.

Simon Balthazar mentions on the band’s website that they were having trouble figuring out where the start revealing the new album so they figured that they’d just start at the beginning. Hopefully that tells me that “Replicate” is not a single by the stereotypical definition. Meaning that it might not be the strongest track on the album, just the first one. Let’s hope that’s the case because Balthazar has an amazing voice that is not utilized here at all.

Fanfarlo – “Replicate”

The video finds lead singer, Simon Balthazar, thinking about making a swift end of things and being saved by a kindly gentlemen who turns out to be the leader of a Heaven’s Gate type cult with Balthazar filling the 12th and final slot needed for the group to be picked up by a UFO. As it turns out Balthazar doesn’t think this is as good of an idea as the others do.

The quintet also have released an iTunes exclusive EP this week simply called the iTunes Session. All the songs are off of Reservoir but are recorded live.

I just got an email from Baeble Music saying that they filmed Fanfarlo’s concert at Johnny Brenda’s in Philly as well as have a contest brewing. Three lucky fans will get a signed copy of Reservoir and a T-shirt.

Here’s how to enter:

1. Sign into Baeblemusic.com using Facebook Connect. Please register if this is your first time using the site.

2. Go to the the Fanfarlo concert and hit the yellow “Share to Facebook Button” or Facebook icon on the share to menu. After you share with Facebook, make sure that you enter your email address in our remaining pop window, so we can notify you if you win.

OR Leave a Facebook comment letting us know what you think about the concert. We’ll contact you through Facebook if you win.

3. That’s all, you’re entered to win!

4. Contest ends on Wednesday, 3/3. Good Luck!!

Damn! what a year.

We lost Michael Jackson and we gained Girls. The Decemberists put out an LP almost as good as Picaresque, but what with the stiff competition you won’t find it on top 50 lists anywhere. Similarly, considering the new relative logic of the last twelve months, Muse and Mars Volta produced two of the top artistic failures of 2009, which were both fairly solid releases on their own. Adam Lambert rose. Chris Brown fell. It all feels like a 52-week fever dream, although that might just be the Fever Ray talking. And while we’re speaking of Girls and Fever Ray, the video seems intent again, for the first time in years, on killing the radio star.

About the blog. Confession time. This year The Muse in Music zigged, even after the rest of the music blogging world announced, in advance, that it would zag. We didn’t feel Dirty Projectors. Grizzly Bear. Wavves. Real Estate. (One of us didn’t exactly feel Phoenix or Loney, Dear, either.) A telling chunk of indie music this year was just too pastel, too chipper, too, well, beep-boop-beep. So when we kept droning on and on about how fantastic 2009 was treating us musically, we weren’t really talking about Animal Collective.

The best live show we saw together — and this is a bit disingenuous, as it is also the only live show we saw together — was Sea Wolf with Port O’Brien and Sarah Lov, an excellent line-up emphasizing textures and songwriting, harmonies and palpable energy. White Water, White Bloom and Threadbare — combined with Fanfarlo’s Reservoir — form a sort of three-way sampler platter for what we anticipate from indie music in the new decade. Sorry, John Taylor, but tomorrow’s frontman is no longer a magician: YouTube and Twitter have seen to that. The insular rock star is dead. Now the true, erudite musician will rise. The chip on his shoulder might remain when he responds to interview questions and Myspace friend requests, but onstage and in the studio, he is a businessman struggling for market share. He knows much more about the world than the dinosaurs of the previous era did, and he is, as Chris Corner of IAMX put it, a traveling salesman and gypsy. He is humbled, even (gasp!) human. And better for it.

It would be convenient if those three LPs formed the first three of our list, but as we said above and have been saying since January, this has been a truly remarkable year musically. Some of our preferences surprised us. Distilling the music of 2009 — the last year of a truly bewildering decade — might read something like this: during these last twelve months, all of the experimentation paid off.  To wit:

10. Summons of Shining Ruins by Shinobu Nemoto. If this isn’t one of your RSS feeds, add one more electron stream to your coffee break and get after it. As the sign says, “This collection hosts complete, freely downloadable/streamable, often Creative Commons-licensed catalogs of ‘virtual record labels’. These ‘netlabels’ are non-profit, community-built entities dedicated to providing high quality, non-commercial, freely distributable MP3/OGG-format music for online download in a multitude of genres.” As you might imagine, these Clinical Archives gave us plenty to talk about this year, and Shinobu Nemoto’s understated transmission rose high above the chatter. (Myspace|Free download)

7. Riceboy Sleeps, by Jonsi & Alex. Conducted by Sigur Rós frontman Jón Þór Birgisson and his partner Alex Somers, Riceboy Sleeps features rich, simple orchestration, tragic imagery, and remarkable beauty. Those who have been paying attention since July know that I fired off a brief review before I realized the connection to Sigur Rós, but that is exactly the point. Music is finally transcending the personalities behind its creation. We can report on the art form instead of the artists, without fear of chasing our readers off. And you may have noticed the toll that it takes on both when media outlets lose sight of this. (Lala|Rhapsody|Myspace|Last.fm)

6. Crack The Skye, by Mastodon. Low Fruit Alert, but the band name really suits them: stinking, gigantic, stampeding, prehistoric. Sometimes plinka plink plinka isn’t quite enough, and, well, if you buy one metal album this year…. Admittedly it was hard to forgive both band and the co-blogger for this post, but only because I had forgotten the first rule of music appreciation: a work must stand alone on its own merits. (Lala|Rhapsody|Myspace|Last.fm)

5. Climb Up, by Apse. This is alien terrain, and not only because of the heavy space rock flavoring. Beats are tribal and muddled, vocals are distant and baroque. The music is universal. And driven. And weird. And sparse. And familiar. You could ask mom for a no-interest loan to this stuff, or you could summit K2. The opening track absolutely begs a naked beach bacchanal, but for PhD’s only. “Rook” declares checkmate. “Closure” is anything but. (Lala|Rhapsody|Myspace|Last.fm)

4. Kingdom of Welcome Addiction, by IAMX. You paying attention, Mr. Glambert? This is how you do oversexed, oversized, homoerotic, arena rock electronica. The title track’s counterintuitive thesis and disarmingly positive outlook belong on every playlist, and power ballad “I Am Terrified” seeks to define at least one mathematical term more clearly. It stands as one of the finest tracks of the year. (Lala|Rhapsody|Myspace)

3. Bird-Brains, by Tune-Yards. Go back to ’08 and revisit the buzz over Vampire Weekend’s self-titled debut, then apply the whole They’re Rubber, She’s Glue mandate: “Afro-pop,” “infectious,” even “bookish:” all of it applies to this crazy cool (and just plain “crazy”) debut. A month ago we wrote, “This is the second track from her bewildering, heady Bird-Brains, which by March or April we’ll likely all realize was the album of the year in 2009. We just haven’t had enough time to piece through it yet.” By now we’ve had a bit more time. Tick tock tick tock tick tock… (Lala|Rhapsody|Myspace|Last.fm|Free download)

2. Embryonic, by The Flaming Lips. The okies deserve shortlisting based on effort alone. A bizarre and unflagging double album in October, a Dark Side of the Moon remake in December — to say nothing of a spontaneous dick-measuring contest with Arcade Fire in March — someone ought to pour the Lips a drink. And give them the afternoon off. Embryonic is a curious title for a well-established ensemble’s twelfth studio album. Nevertheless it plays: this is their finest and most cohesive work in at least seven years, which for many circles will earn them nothing less than the grade of “comeback.” (Lala|Rhapsody|Myspace)

For several reasons — all of which are arbitrary and subjective — nothing would please me more than to award Wayne Coyne & Company the album of the year. For starters, I’ve been aware of them for years and they’ve scarcely recorded a note that I haven’t liked. Even more capricious, since Evangelicals took the prize last year and surely might next year, it would put a three-year-long stick in the eye of every city in the world but Norman, Oklahoma. But more than anything, music — like any other creative endeavor — is a young man’s game. At 41, I’d like to think the 48-year-old Coyne is still capable of the top slot. But fate had other plans.  Pandora led us to A Hawk And A Hacksaw, which led us to The Leaf Label, which led us to…

1. The Snake, by Wildbirds and Peacedrums. The appellate judge has made it clear that my posting any more reviews of this LP would constitute a violation of the restraining order. (That must be one of the reasons the current tour doesn’t stop at Texas or the surrounding states.) Scroll through our previous work here. Give the album a spin at one of the following links, or just buy the thing. You’ve heard nothing else quite like it. (Lala|Rhapsody|Myspace)

(Postscript: the attentive reader will note that this dispatch skipped listings #9 and #8, which interestingly enough are, respectively, White Water, White Bloom (Lala) and Reservoir (Lala). Sea Wolf and Fanfarlo have a gaggle of last-minute editing room floor additions to thank for that, so hoorays all around!)

Dear John was the first album I heard this year that made it onto this potential list. It also opened a great year for Sweden and all the amazing acts that are calling it home. Emil Svanangen turns a bit more to his darker and depressed side on this album in comparison to 2007′s Loney Noir with lines like “all the times I make it worse with all the devils in my head” and “Tell me I’m good enough, that I could change”. Even with these lyrics the album is welcoming with it’s atmospheric textures.

09. The Mars Volta – Octahedron

When Octahedron was released I sat at my desk and stared at Rhapsody for about twenty minutes before I pushed play. There was potential for this album to go either way. After hearing the first single I must say that I was a bit frightened but in the end Octahedron turned into one of my favorite Mars Volta albums just due to the fact they pulled in the reigns a little bit. There is still the psychedelic instrumentation but at the same time everything sounds well thought out and not completely chaotic as they have been known to do in the past.

08. A.C. Newman – Get Guilty

Taking a break from his primary group, The New Pornographers, Carl Newman found in him the ability to separate himself and write songs that are distinctly all his . Neko Case definitely gets more of the public eye as a side project from the band but in a more fair world Newman would have found himself on far more top ten lists this year.

07. Other Lives – S/T

This goes down as one of the most beautiful and well written albums I’ve heard all year. The tone never really rises above a whisper but the layering of instruments is orchestrated perfectly to comprise an album that from beginning to end won’t let you down. Occasionally it can fall into the background and be forgotten but it also reels you back in to demand your full attention.

06. Beirut – March of The Zapotec & Realpeople Holland

Technically this is a maxi EP but since all the songs are written by Condon I consider it to be a Beirut album just with a side A and a side B. Side A features a mixture of many different countries from Mexican funeral processions, Eastern European/Balkan influences to early 20′s jazz. While side B dabbles in the electronic arrangements a la Postal Service. Between The Flying Cup Club and this years release Zach Condon will have to go down as one of the most under appreciated and brilliant artist that we have today.

05. Mastodon – Crack The Skye

Every top ten list needs a surprise entrant and this year it’s Mastodon. I haven’t enjoyed a metal album in a very long time but one thing that I can’t deny is that I love a talented band with great harmonizing. Stepping aside from the scream riddled songs of Blood Mountain we learn in Crack The Skye that each has a great ability to sing and harmonize with one another

04. BLK JKS – After Robots

I kept hearing about BLK JKS over and over again but for some reason I continually blew them off without even the slightest listen. I’m glad that I finally came to my sense and gave the album a spin and then another spin. The album is rich with culture and the group let’s their South African roots show through. It’s nice to hear a true afro-pop group that doesn’t wear Polo’s.

03. Fanfarlo – Reservoir

I initially picked up this album for $1 when they put it on sale around the fourth of July and since then it has been a staple of mine from day to day. The privilege to see them live last month also helped catapult Reservoir to the #3 slot. The multiple layers that each song is built on only prove the true talent of this bands multi-instrumental skills.

02. Brendan Benson – My Old Familiar Friend

It’s a shame that it took the success of the Racontuers to give Brendan Benson the boost that he needed into a spotlight that is well deserved. Benson is an extremely talented musician with the ability to write and perform songs from all different genres without making it seem awkward or forced.

01. Silversun Pickups – Swoon

An album hasn’t transfixed me the way that Swoon has in a long time. I nearly wore out my copy keeping it on constant replay. Each song comes in around five minutes and not a single minute is one that I would want to omit. The gruff and often strained voice of Brian Aubert is a welcome relief from all the pitch perfect singers that we are told is the way singing should be.

The night opened with a local Fort Worth band called Telegraph Canyon, an Americana folk act that there are just too many comparisons to list but I’ll try. Mix in some Fleet Foxes, My Morning Jacket, Band of Horses and the epic beard of Sam Beam and you’ll start to get a taste of what I heard last night. The group played a relatively short set of songs off their latest album The Tide and The Current and got the room in the mood for the remaining acts.

A solid opening act is crucial to a good show. If you have an act that is not in line with what will be heard the remainder of the evening or is just flat and stiff then the rest of the night will reflect that. Telegraph Canyon was neither. The violinist was especially good now that I realize I played in the high school orchestra with her.

After a stage reset Freelance Whales began their set. I’ve mentioned before that Freelance Whales is an unsigned band from New York but what I found out last night is that they are on their first tour outside of the great state of NY. I would never have believed this fact if you told me after the show as they presented themselves as road warriors. The set was tight and they showed no signs of jitters or nervousness on their first trip to Dallas.

Audiences are becoming more refined in what they want to hear so bands need to bring something different to the stage whether it be new instruments or a great stage show. Freelance Whales brought both in toting along with them on the road instruments that I have never seen before, namely the harmonium and waterphone and using tin watering cans to provide some extra percussion.

This group is quite a bit harder to pigeon hole into a predetermined category. There are laces of folk that are delivered via banjo but mostly the songs fall under more of an indie pop umbrella with catchy hooks and four part harmonies. Each track has a kind of child like aura to it which could be due the fact that none of the members look a day over 25.

Anticipation was building as sound checks went on for Fanfarlo to begin their set. Although still a very unknown band in the music scene everyone there knew what they were in for and couldn’t wait much longer for it. As the band took the stage I was reminded of the common appearance of the group. There is nothing here that shouts “musical savants”. If they were to be put in a line up no one would ever pick them out as one of the best baroque pop bands touring today. I believe that they use this to their advantage in what I like to call the “Susan Boyle Effect”. You may all remember the look on the judges face when Susan Boyle took the stage in Britain’s Got Talent and then proceeded to blow them away. I’m sure that Fanfarlo has had this effect on many people over the last few years.

The show started out light with just three of the members taking the stage to play “Finish Line” and the remaining three coming on afterward to really get the show started. The stage presence was immense as the band continually exchanged instruments throughout. Switching instruments during a show used to be a novelty act for a band. Something that would be done as an extra little treat for the audience on the last song but Fanfarlo, and Freelance Whales for that matter, do it as a common occurrence, not to boast their abilities but to squeeze every bit of layering that they can into each song.

They proceeded to play nearly every song from their fantastic 2009 release Reservoir and hit all the high points along the way with “I’m A Pilot”, “Luna”, “Harold T. Wilkins”, “The Walls Are Coming Down” and came back for an encore to play “Ghost”. They also managed to squeeze in a brand new track called “Waiting In The Wings”.

Overall the night was a huge success. Each act built on the next like a perfect game of Jenga with the whole thing crashing us back down to reality with the closing chords of “Ghost” and forcing us back out into the cold night. But at least we had great songs ringing in our ears.

Fanfarlo is trying to rekindle these childhood memories with an advent calendar of their own. For the next 25 days they will be posting something on their website to correspond with the date. Today is a video of them searching through a Nebraska gift shop in hopes of finding something unique to put in what they’re calling their “Christmas Hamper” which will be given to some lucky fan at the end of the month. We’ll have to see if each day will be a new video or tour pics or what not.