Swedish music blog Absolut Noise listed the debut album from Stockholm's Don't Be A Stranger as the best pop/rock album this year, comparing the music to PJ Harvey and the Velvet Underground and calling it "brilliant from its first moment to its last."

Listen to selected tracks from Frutti di Mare after the break!

Rick Lucy lives in the same vein as MGMT, Animal Collective, Blue States and a growing list of others: dwelling in an area blurred by alternative pop and electronica/trip-hop. Music you groove to, but that doesn't immediately beckon you to the nearest rave. It's a line that was once hard to live on, but has broadened as of late. It's more than experimental effort, it's about the artist exposing his soft underbelly for all to see, all the while showing that artists don't have to be confined to a genre to be smart about what they do.

"Fans of Belle and Sebastian's witty bookworm pop are an obsessive lot, and no doubt they'll snap up this cherry-picked collection of BBC recordings from 1996 to 2001. The draw for devotees is four rare songs from a 2001 session... But the selection is so good, the set doubles as a best-of -- it's a fine intro to the group's tuneful world of lovelorn geekdom."

[3.5 stars]

Sporting song titles like "Stripper" and "No Regrets" and having performed at Playboy's Moscow Playboy party in August 2006, you'd expect something pretty sexually charged out of the UK bratz Sohodolls. And they deliver.

Each racy track from this co-ed clan of five is a hot rush of adrenaline, reminiscent of the Queen of Pop herself (Madonna) during her flashy peak in the eighties.

In addition to bringing you this week's featured releases from Gramercy Arms, Belle & Sebastian, The Kin and more, we're kicking off an effort to help fight hunger as the Thanksgiving holiday approaches.

We've teamed up with Food Bank For New York City to raise money for New Yorkers in need, and for the next week Amie Street will be donating 50% of proceeds from sales of all Cheap Lullaby artists to the Food Bank!

"The lyrics in The Snow Magic are optimistically melancholic, all rose petal lilts and murder ballad, cynical love stories and ghostly allusions. A feeling of being butterfly-stomached at the fading away of things. Copious complements to an autumn day. And while the album is dark and moody, there are moments of loosey-goose joy and playfulness that I would describe like barroom gypsy jazz in contrast to the funereal glum and glow of the record."

Throw a line into the sloshing waters of the great power pop pond (or maybe just the Chesapeake Bay) baited with a strip of metal that picks up honeyed alternative indie vocals and classic rock instrumentation, and The Seldon Plan will immediately swim over to your line and start nibbling. A quick tug and you've landed yourself a veritable icon of modern indie rock on the Eastern shore.

"Karl Blau comes from the same island hamlet as Phil Elverum, the enigmatic rocker behind The Microphones and Mount Eerie. Beyond their crunchy idyllic roots, living among the ferryboats and the evergreens, they share a unique way of seeing. One finds in their work a hallucinatory vision of the Pacific Northwest halfway between 'Twin Peaks' and 'Northern Exposure': Warm but weird, by turns cheerful and dark, equally alive to the natural and supernatural, and pleased as punch to tread the rim of civilization."

[7.7]

The Chemistry of Common Life is the latest album from Ontario-based F*cked Up. It's a feedback-drenched post-punk explosion. This music is characterized by walls of howling guitars, hooks that make you want smash something, and the Lemmy-like growl of frontman Pink Eyes. The feedback is so thick at times, so churning and dense, you may actually hear tones and pitches that may not be there. Far out -- I know. Prepare yourself beforehand for this music. The band's name implies what may happen to you.

What started as an eerie, plaintive, half-sung, half-whispered tune by The Long Lost comes out as two excellent, sparkling remixes in the hands of LA producer Flying Lotus.

Woebegone (Flying Lotus's Luckiest Charm) stands on its own as one of the finest electronic singles for fall/winter '08, with perfect timing for the cold weather. Flying Lotus's drums stutter and skip atop a simple guitar line, and he adds just a hint of processing to Laura Darlington's translucent vocals to make the whole thing icy and delicately textured.