Three Release Tuesday

At least three great releases are out today. Love Okkervil River's The Silver Gymnasium. Says Consequence of Sound:

The Silver Gymnasium is about his hometown of Meriden, New Hampshire, circa 1986, a tiny village where the songwriter admits he was bullied throughout his childhood. It’s a community he’d have every right to despise, but doesn’t. Despite any residual pain, Sheff recognizes the inherent magic of the place where you grew up, especially when viewed through your childhood memories, which, as he pointed out in our recent interview, often become indistinguishable from dreams and fantasies. Although the album is peppered with small-town tragedy, or at least regret, as well as a sense that the then ten-year-old Sheff will eventually get out, it also brims with imagination and the natural majesty found in The Granite State.

Also out today: Volcano Choir and Neko Case. 

Three First Listens

NPR music is streaming early three albums I'm anticipating for Fall, which seems to have even more blockbuster releases than Spring did. Volcano Choir, Justin Vernon's new project, will whet the appetite of every Bon Iver fan.

In ambition and in quality, Repave sits closer on the spectrum to 2011's Bon Iver than it does to Unmap, and both of those records were terrific to begin with. Vernon's lyrics, while characteristically oblique, are largely decipherable here, as the players around him — guys he's admired since well before he broke through himself — work wonders in arrangements that swell and boom. Where it loses some of Unmap's dreamy, nonlinear ambiguity, Repave gains Bon Iver's tendency toward impeccably fussed-over majesty. As the grandiosity of "Byegone" gives way to the enchantingly delicate "Alaskans," it's clear that chunks of Repave could have been plopped into Bon Iver without seeming out of place.

Franz Ferdinand has reemerged, and it'll perk you up after Volcano Choir. Followed by the fabulous Neko Case, whose album "tucks thrills into its margins and doles them out in time-release doses. As her subtle touches suddenly cohere and register as surprises six or eight listens later (wait, are those submarine noises?), it's clear that Case remains essentially peerless: No one sounds like her, so every little revelation feels altogether new."

Going to be a good Fall. 

New Neko Case

NPR Music previewed the new single by Neko Case. Definitely download "Man" off the forthcoming The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love. You can find it on NPR Music.