Broken Peak

Though Broken Bells featured two of the bigger names in indie and alternative music – the Shins' singer/guitarist James Mercer and producer/multi-instrumentalist Brian Burton, aka Danger Mouse – the duo managed to keep their project secret for a relatively long time. The pair were inspired to collaborate when they met at 2004's Roskilde music festival in Denmark, where they discovered they were fans of each other's work. However, they didn't start writing and recording together as a band until March 2008, when Mercer holed up in Burton's home studio in Los Angeles. The duo took a different approach to their work together than they had with their other projects: Burton avoided the sample-heavy style he used on The Grey Album and Beck's Modern Guilt, and played only live instruments, while Mercer broadened his vocal style to include falsettos and deeper registers. Mercer and Burton announced they were Broken Bells in fall 2009, and late that year they released their debut single, "The High Road." Their self-titled debut album arrived in spring 2010.

Once a two-person basement recording project, Broken Social Scene came to life onstage as a shadowy improvisational entity with a revolving-door roster, each concert a wholly unique experience dependent on the room, the weather, what they ate for dinner that night, and who was dropping in to play. Where the band’s 2001 debut album, Feel Good Lost, presented BSS as an anonymous ambient project that reflected its humble, homespun origins, their electrifying live performances from that era rallied an extended family of performers with roots in post-rock (Justin Peroff, Do Make Say Think’s Charles Spearin), Latin jazz (Andrew Whiteman), art-folk (Feist), synth-pop (Amy Millan and Evan Cranley, also of Stars), dance-punk (Metric’s Emily Haines and Jimmy Shaw), and country rock (Jason Collett).

St. Paul and The Broken Bones release their new album The Alien Coast on ATO Records. Produced by Matt Ross-Spang, and featuring eleven new, original songs, The Alien Coast is the first St. Paul and The Broken Bones album tracked in the band’s hometown of Birmingham, AL. The arrangement allowed the octet to spend more time and tap a broader creative community than ever before, resulting in their most ambitious work to date. Led by singer and lyricist Paul Janeway - a former bank teller and preacher-in-training who learned to sing in his church choir - the octet explore thrilling new territory on The Alien Coast, a fever dream convergence of soul and psychedelia, stoner metal and funk, animated by the very “fire and brimstone” which Janeway invokes in the album’s opening line.