After 10 years of writing about music, I’m sent a ludicrous amount of new music. Packages from all over the world from people I've never heard of show up daily. Where they get my address I do not know. Even listening to one or more new things a day on average, I can only scratch the surface, especially with the deluge of downloads flying at me lately. So, I have a limbo spot called the “Box of Intrigue” for CDs that caught my attention for some reason â€" compelling artwork, a band member I’m familiar with from elsewhere, an interesting cover tune choice, a line in the press release that snags me – but never made it into the active rotation. A few times each year I spend a week scanning the contents of the box. While much of it is landfill-ready, there are charmers that crawl from the pile. This week’s mix represents 15 artists that made my ears prick up in the latest round of listening. I chose cuts that got my attention immediately to increase the chances of a good first impression. May you find a few new intrigues in this bunch.

If you experience playback problems, pop over to the 8tracks mix page and it should play fine.

track listing

Melancholy and memory shuffle with weary smiles on Miss Fortune , the solo debut of Tea Leaf Green keyboardist-lead singer Trevor Garrod, who’s made a song cycle for Eleanor Rigby and her downhearted kin, a lovely, openly aching journey that firms up Garrod’s place as a contemporary answer to Randy Newman and a peer to modern troubadours like Rufus Wainwright and Josh Rouse.

"It's a record for break ups and bad days. For cold foggy summers stuck in the top story of a light house. It's a warning to heedless ships on the wanton sea. It's a journey to safe harbours and salvation,” says Garrod, and he’s not wrong in the slightest. Gray skies hover as emotional storms thunder and shower, but what’s impressive is how Garrod keeps things from being a grim pity party. He’s just facing down the darkness and sadness we all face from time to time, looking it straight in the eyes and communicating what he sees with unflinching honesty and more than a little abject beauty. Unlike Wainwright, he isn’t overwrought or ornate in his presentation, carving out his portraits with spare arrangements that still feel full and let individual instruments sway with his voice, which takes the spotlight on Miss Fortune. Garrod’s pipes bring to mind a whole host of classic pop crooners â€" Badfinger’s Pete Ham, Squeeze’s Glenn Tilbrook, the bruised, quiet side of John Lennon â€" but maintain an individual character and wide open emotional timbre that’s moving and softly elegant, particularly on these tunes.

Miss Fortune is a pretty far cry from his work in Tea Leaf Green, where he shows a more playful, boogie ready character, thus making this solo set a perfect adjunct to his established catalog, a thing apart that reveals further depths in a young artist who continues to steadily grow with each passing year. The level of craftsmanship and care on Miss Fortune creates a resonant experience, a flickering, faltering glow to warm ourselves by on days when it seems we’ve spent too much time in bad company and the end is closer than the beginning. Miss Fortune helps us process these inky, difficult feelings and come out the other side strangely brighter.

Eli Jebidiah by John Margaretten

Eli Jebidiah is a sneaky axe man. It’s tough to get a bead on his own style because he’s such a gifted chameleon, taking on the not inconsiderable challenge of inhabiting the styles of Prince, Jack White and Duane Allman in just in the past year, not to mention his original work in Poor Man’s Whiskey. Eli is a grand listener, filling in the spaces his fellow musicians leave open and accentuating the positive in their playing. Increasingly, he’s shown himself an emerging bandleader, taking over the reins of Bay Area six-string orgy Guitarmageddon and steering it into interesting new spaces [check it out for yourself this Thursday, February 24 at Slim’s in San Francisco at the inaugural Guitarmageddon Blues Ball. More info here]. What remains universal in all of Eli’s various incarnations â€" be it PMW, Guitarmageddon or his new solo effort Huckle – is the residing quality and sincerity of the music he makes. As baldly enjoyable as his output and performances often are, there’s serious respect for his craft and an attention to detail that emerges in the economy and zing of his guitar work. He’ll make you smile and then back it up with ample chops and imagination. What the hell else do you want from a shredder?

read on for Eli’s answers

A considerably softer assortment than last week but it’s just how the music flowed into the tape. Blame it on the weather, though for the record, we like both rainy days and Mondays. And having Karen Carpenter and Mama Cass share a ham sandwich. We like that idea, too.

If you experience playback problems, pop over to the 8tracks mix page and it should play fine.

track listing

Al Howard by Dennis Cook

Al Howard by Dennis Cook

This is Al Howard, a rhymer of the first order and currently percussionist in The Heavy Guilt, a promising young band out of San Diego, CA. This Free Bird shot was taken at High Sierra Music Festival last summer. He's got the attitude down and we simply love the Slayer t-shirt. The band is currently working on their second album, and we liked their first one plenty, so we're excited to hear what comes next.

Are you interested in giving Dirty Impound the finger? Are you in a band? Well, we wanna see whatcha you got, cowboys (and cowgirls)! Send us your birdie pics and we’ll add them to our archive and make sure folks know you cared enough to raise a middle finger for rock! Send pictures to freebird@dirtyimpound.com

Wayne Coyne of The Flaming Lips by Josh Miller

Wayne Coyne of The Flaming Lips by Josh Miller

This shot of The Flaming Lips was taken at Bonnaroo 2007 and is one of my favorite "live music photos" I've taken….the color, the expression…it really captures what I love most about the live music performance.

And here's the first new original music from the Lips since their Embryonic album. "Two Blobs Fucking" was released on Monday in honor of Valentine's Day

Funk is a grand mutt, as much Saturday night as Sunday morning, able to swerve into a horizontal bounce and just as quickly raise the roof with skipping abandon. As much the child of rock as it is soul, and thus open to many, many interpretations, funk is also remarkably easy to make boring and predictable after 40 or so years, which is why contemporary proponents like NYC’s Pimps of Joytime and Seattle’s Staxx Brothers are such treasures. Both are the rare modern good-footers that kill it live and in the studio, moving the line of their tradition forward with sweaty, aggressive purpose and creativity. The two recently teamed up for some West Coast shows where Staxx warmed up the folks before PJT laid it down hard. There’s just TOO much to like about both bands, who mine different aspects of the funk subculture in ways that make it fresh and relevant, and the San Francisco gig was some of the most irresistible music we've laid ears on this year.

Our pal John Margaretten got some primo shots of the two bands in action at SF’s best club size venue, The Independent, when the pair came to town on January 21st, packing the place and lighting a happy fire under our back fields. Once again, John’s snaps capture the mood and feel of the night really beautifully. (Dennis Cook)

[amtap amazon:asin=B004DTFMPM]

While most of the works of this world are doomed to dust, there are things that last, mostly truths that remain solid beyond notions of yesterday, today and tomorrow. These sorts of non-ephemeral things tend to shift their form, choosing whatever representation might work best at reaching folks, and thus maintaining their elusive nature through transmogrification. Still, we recognize an enduring an idea even glimpsed through veils, and there are SO many of these enduring, big ideas inside the work of Nathan Moore, and never more so than Dear Puppeteer (released February 1), which serves as a crystallized summation of what’s already special about Moore and extends the possibilities in a quietly stunning way.

pull the string