Posted by Music Intern Chris Govella

What's new this week? Dave Segal on Filastine's bass-heavy sonic weapons:

In "Marxa," a track off Filastine's potent, diverse new album, Dirty Bomb, there's a sample of Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti saying, "Music is the weapon of the future." It forces one to ponder if some sonic properties can be inherently threatening to the status quo. German producer Alec Empire used to say, "Riot sounds produce riots"; it's possible that this was not merely a catchy slogan to sell records.

"Like all sound bites, [Fela's statement is] an elegant falsehood," Filastine observes via e-mail from the wilds of New Mexico as he preps for a North American tour. "Music has been, is, and will be a weapon. There is nothing so futuristic about it. It could be one of the principal weapons of the future, as other forms of resistance are made impossible or recuperated into advertising campaigns. Music doesn't need lyrics to be subversive; it can tell stories with frequencies."

Eric Grandy talks with Max Tundra about his latest album, Parallax Error Beheads You:

"Well, none of my songs are really about anything specific," says Jacobs. "But if you were to interpret the first verse of 'Which Song,' it's not about Kevin Blechdom herself, but it's about a girl who is a little paranoid that a song I have written is about Kevin Blechdom. So maybe it's a song about a song about Kevin Blechdom.

"Because, in the past, I have been in situations with girls who might have been jealous that I was also involved with other girls. A lot of this album was written when I was kind of breaking up with people and maybe starting up with other people, and it was quite a kind of awkward time, personally."

Larry Mizell Jr. on GMK's new Songs for Bloggers EP, as well as upcoming performances by young hiphoppers Dyno Jamz:

The High Dive in beautiful Fremont has some decent programming itself this week—Friday, April 10, it hosts recent EMP Sound Off! finalists Dyno Jamz and Razpy & the Vigilantes, along with bands Eli Porter and Bottle of Smoke (a Pogues cover band, of all things). Actually, the jazz/hiphop eight-piece Dyno Jamz weren't just finalists—they won the whole goddamn thing.

Previews of this week's notable Up and Coming happenings, such as this Friday's performance by Los Campesinos!:

On the highly productive band's two (!) 2008 albums Hold On Now, Youngster... and We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed, Los Campesinos! perfectly merge breathless urgency, winningly twee lyricism and boy/girl singing, and deceptively sharp playing (their songs are pointedly combustive and frantic and sound like they should be falling apart, yet every fiddle and glockenspiel note lands just right).

Wavves frotnman Nathan Williams talks indie rock "beef," industry buzz, and the band's newest record Wavvves:

As for the insinuation that Wavves is somehow inauthentically low-fidelity, Williams laughs. "I don't even know what that means. Yeah, man, I'm trying to capitalize on that huge lo-fi sound—all of these lo-fi artists we know making big bucks, huge commercial stuff, Pepsi- product endorsements. I don't know, I think it's all silly. It's high-school drama stuff."

Fucking in the Streets on Seattle trio Born Anchors:

Live, the band demonstrate a knack for combining disparate momentums—frontman Jason Parker's rumbling bass grooves, Gregory Scott's shimmering, echoing guitar lines, Justin Martinez's hard-pounding drumming—into a unified whole. Martinez, especially, is a pleasure to watch, a perfectly tight and heavy-hitting drummer with a wicked mustache, but the whole band is energetic and on-point (on one song, the group dropped everything except a looped guitar line and all jumped back in with a great, breaking crescendo).

Data Breaker on where Regis and Function's techno meets black metal:

Regis's approach involves sternum-bruising beats and kinetic percussion clattering with emergency urgency, often beneath chilling, postindustrial atmospherics and harrowing string embellishments. Like Function, Regis masterfully and subtly tweaks his bedrock beats, creating potently mesmerizing effects while avoiding monotony.

Casey Catherwood reviews local upstarts Braidstorm:

These three Central District ladies use dual drum sets and bass guitar to build a primitive, funky dance-punk sound reminiscent of Delta 5 or the Raincoats. On their debut tape, Chair Dad (available for the first time at tonight's show), shared vocals and drums combine in an ingenious, feet-moving swirl.

Christopher DeLaurenti enjoys the silence with Gordon Hempton:

"Of all 390 parks in the National Park System," attests Hempton, "Olympic National Park is the listener's Yosemite—a place of quiet and sonic diversity." Nestled inside the park is what Hempton calls OSI, short for One Square Inch of Silence, a sanctuary he's designated to fulfill a surprisingly hard-to-attain goal: a place to listen without hearing the sounds of human activity.

Michaelangelo Matos catches up on a ton of singles and album cuts with an It's a Hit speed-round:

2000 and One's "State of House" (100% Pure), which features obvious club-music signifiers such as "Baby, baby," and "No man in the world," repeated almost randomly over a pumping, minimal track featuring an ultrasimple keyboard riff that sounds like it's nodding off and waking itself up over and over again.

Reviews of the Thermals' Now We Can See, Mulatu Astatke and the Heliocentrics' Inspiration Information 3, and Wooden Shjips' Dos:

The weirdest thing about the Thermals' new album, their fourth (and first for Kill Rock Stars rather than Sub Pop), is how much it dwells in the past tense. The album starts with a song called "When I Died"; it's followed by "We Were Sick," "When We Were Alive," and "When I Was Afraid"; the first verb out of singer Hutch Harris's mouth is "was." Indeed, the album's lyrics seem, loosely, to look posthumously back on the scorched earth of their last album, the rousing mini-epic The Body, the Blood, the Machine. The unfortunate thing is that this vantage point sucks out some of that old fierce urgency—all the action has already happened, so what now is left?

Plus! Poster of the Week, this week's Party Crasher, and the Stranger's complete, searchable Music Calendar Listings.