January 29, 2013 – The jangle and rasp of "Low," the leadoff track from Cracker's 1993 platinum album Kerosene Hat, was a ubiquitous signpost of the alternative-as-the-new-mainstream era. As just one example, by the end of 1994, its noir-ish video was more popular on MTV than Springsteen or Jodeci. And it survived long after life in the Buzz Bin, spending two decades as a staple on rock radio, and remains a beacon sending televised sporting events to the great commercial break in the sky.The song bestowed unlikely rock stardom on frontman David Lowery, who by 1993 was a couple of years removed from his former band Camper Van Beethoven, a weirdly wonderful gaggle of quirk-poppers who invaded college radio like a Martian jug band playing Balkan folk-punk.

January 14, 2013 – After breaking college radio with the Dr. Demento fave "Take the Skinheads Bowling" in 1985, we never imagined Camper Van Beethoven would be making news three decades later. But here we are, and CVB are blowing up our Twitter feeds, thanks to frontman David Lowery going ham on an NPR intern and indie-pop supergroup Divine Fits covering Camper's "I Was Born in a Laundromat" on a recent seven-inch.For 30 years and counting, Camper Van Beethoven have existed in a parallel-universe borderland, coming across like a punk band perpetually on a Balkan bluegrass bender. But they finally bring it all back home to their native California on 10th album, La Costa Perdida, recalling '60s-vintage West Coast pop filtered through their timeless, idiosyncratic prism. To get the story of the album, we caught up with Lowery about the mystique of Northern California and the myths of file-sharing.

February 8, 2012 – Sixteen years into their career, timeless sugar high Imperial Teen remains one of the most immediate and appealing bands in the alt-rock cosmos. The quartet has never sounded better than on their just-released fifth album, Feel the Sound (Merge Records). SPIN already dubbed it one of 2012's essential releases, adding they're "sounding like a veteran quartet with nothing to prove, but still hellbent on proving it anyway," and their delectable concoction of exuberant harmonies and grownup lyrical concerns finds the Teen wearing middle age proudly. We caught up with guitarist/keyboardist Will Schwartz and bassist Jone Stebbins shortly before they headed for Denver to start rehearsals for their American tour. Stream Feel the Sound in its entirety! So, your last album, 2007’s The Hair the TV the Baby & the Band listed everybody’s then-current pursuits.

June 7, 2011 – When Hutch Harris and Kathy Foster of the Thermals were looking to leave their hometown of San Jose, California, they wanted to move to a community that was creative and also cheap. The indie punkers (along with drummer Westin Glass) wound up in the Northwestern hamlet of Portland, Oregon. "We've always been really proud to be from Portland and sound like a band from the Northwest," Harris says. "Bands from up here are always a little rough around the edges, kind of jagged, never perfect-sounding. That's us." Here's where you'll most likely find Harris around town. Breakfast spotJunior's Cafe1742 SE 12th Ave. 503-467-4971 Junior's is small, without much in the way of elbow room, so getting a table there can take a while. But it's worth the wait, with a menu friendly to every taste, from vegan to carnivorous.

May 17, 2011 – With its explosive blend of martial rhythms, dive-bomb guitar chords, and lead singer Sameer Gadhia's emphatic falsetto-to-bellow vocals, Young the Giant's breakthrough single, "My Body," sounds like the work of a band born to rattle rafters. But the frontman insists that isn't so. "We're nice normal dudes who don't take ourselves too seriously," says Gadhia. "We started playing just as a bit of nonsense and ridiculousness." Then leave it to others to treat Young the Giant with more reverence. Earlier this year, "My Body" charted at No. 5 on Billboard's Alternative Rock singles chart and the band performed the song on Jimmy Kimmel Live. They'll spend the summer on a headline tour of Europe (returning for Stateside gigs at the Sasquatch and Lollapalooza festivals) and be back home for a U.S. jaunt in the fall--not bad considering the L.A.

January 18, 2011 – It was the poorest-kept secret in town: The unidentified "Special Guests" on the bill at Saturday night's Love Language show at Carrboro, N.C.'s Cat's Cradle were Archers of Loaf, the much-beloved indie icons from adjacent Chapel Hill, making their first public appearance since 1998 (at the site of their last show, no less). So it wasn't surprising that the place was packed to capacity, but it was surprising that their reunion performance lived up to and beyond the expectations of even the sunniest optimist. You wouldn't call the Archers influential, exactly, because it's difficult to pinpoint anyone who has followed in their idiosyncratic musical wake. They were the perfect next-step band for those who found Pavement too straightforward, with an angular guitar roar that was always just a little too weird for mainstream tastes.

March 26, 2009 – The Love Language's Stuart McLamb insists he doesn't seek chaos for art's sake -- it just seems to find him. "It's funny how that works," he says over cigarettes and coffee at a java joint in his band's hometown of Raleigh, North Carolina. "I'll have these periods where just nothing is in my head. Then it's like a phoenix, coming out under stress. There's got to be easier ways to get the wheels turning." But it's from that chaos that the Love Language arose. In 2006, McLamb was kicked out of his former band, garage rockers the Capulets, after he broke into their practice space in a drunken stupor to teach a girl to play drums and ended up trashing some gear. After a painful breakup with his girlfriend, his downward spiral culminated in a drinking binge of epic proportions.